Saturday, March 29, 2008

John V. Classic: V= Victory

So the guiding light of this poker breeding ground known as the FCPC set up a nice new tournament structure and 19 runners came out to play. Very few pot control skills were in evidence. Rivered one-outered quads over top set were seen. Two-outered sets vs. overpairs were seen. Runner-runner straights vs. top set were seen.

I ran into floppped quads again (... twice in two consecutive tournaments, this is probably a 20:1 longshot or more, considering both of them involved the same two players, myself and Joanne!), this time with a straight (but managed to find a fold to the river RR). I had a turned full house beat by a rivered bigger full house (AK vs. KQ on a K22K board; A on river). As the big stack I 3-bet with AKs and got 4-bet by Bill's 99 - it was a no-brainer call based on the pot odds obviously -- and I didn't win the race. Standard day at the office.

With all this I still amassed a big stack with all the other hands where I successfully manipulated the pot size according to my hand strength and my opponents' combativeness to make a big comeback at the final table as the cash bubble broke. (or lack thereof). I ran into some big hands and actually sucked out a couple of times (JJ vs. AA with 8 players left, I rivered a J when I called a RR and shoved the KK8 flop since I was short). Another crucial outdraw came about when I got short-stacked again 3-handed and I ran 97s into KK when I open-shoved with less than ten big bets 3-handed and got called and then the BB woke up with the cowboys and re-raised to give me protection. I caught a 7 on the flop and rivered a beautiful 9 to triple up to over 30K in chips and never looked back.

When I finally got headsup vs. Joanne -- I finally eliminated James when he shoved with two undercards and a gutterball (56s) when I had bottom pair and a higher gutterball (J7) on a T87 rainbow board and he didn't improve -- I had a significant chiplead so when she re-popped me allin (I had raised with K5 on the button) for less than the size of the pot, I had to call getting 2:1 odds. Unfortunately I was up against A5 but I caught a miracle K on the flop to end the tournament at the five-hour mark.

2 comments:

Schaubs said...

I've never seen someone suckout in a live tournament more than you.

Glad to read you took it down (and came back from the short stack), but you are a luckbox... sorry, but it's true.

Shrike said...

No argument here. I had nine lives last night and somehow survived pushing into AA and KK and cracking both of them. Other than that I liked how I played.