Friday, April 02, 2010

Poker: Home Tournament – April 2010

Doubtless due to the Easter weekend, turnout was lower than normal  and only 9 players this month.   (will pay more attention to the calendar next year!)  

That doesn’t mean the game was any less exciting than with more players

Alex made a good start by flopping trips and having pocket A’s in the first few hands so took the early lead.  After that things were quite steady with a lot of un-raised multi-player pots.   My main opportunity was flopping a nut flush draw and four people getting all-in.  Jock was ahead with top pair (of 8’s) but Alex and Jon (I think) having straight draws.   Jon hit the str8 to take a good pot.  

After the break there was more action as the blinds started to put pressure on the short stacks.   Jock was the bubble boy when he got all-in with Andy with the same chips stack, so we knew one of them was likely to be first out  !

My memory is a bit vague (as normal) but remember being fairly low chipped until I saw A-To and raised.  Alex who was probably chip lead at the time called my raise.  When he checked the 8xx flop (2 diamonds) I went all-in and he called with Ad-9d  leaving me holding my breath and not wanting to see any more diamonds.  Luckily my A-T held up and I doubled up giving me a fair number of chips.

As the blinds increased the play got more interesting and I was able to maintain around average stack as the number of players decreased.   Another key hand came after I had taken a good stack of chips and Bill had just busted Darren out in 4th place.  I was on SB with Jon short stacked on the BB with blinds at 800/100 by now.  As Bill folded, I decided to steal Jon’s blind with my 8-7o and raised to 4000.  Jon thought for a while then shoved all-in, but I was getting over 3:1 so had committed myself to put him all-in if he called anyway.  Jon showed A-A (80% chance to win) however the 7-7-4 flop destroyed his chances and I took Jon out on a lucky flop

I had a good lead over Bill and managed to whittle him down but then he staged a come back and doubled up a couple of times to take the chip lead.   I was soon down to 10’000 chips to Bill’s 40’000 (blinds up to 1200 by now) so had to start shoving.  Incredibly, Bill kept folding and I soon got my stack up again.   Bill then fought back and it was very to and fro.      In the end I had slightly more chips than Bill and shoved all-in with K-6   Bill called with K-4 and it looked all over…. until a 4 came on the flop… but in a cruel twist of fate my 6 came on the turn and I had won the tournament !!

The heads up in particular was very exciting for me, but the whole game had a very interesting dynamic and everyone was up for a good gamble, so was another great game. 

Looking forward to next month already !

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