So yesterday Suzy, Special K, T and I rode down to G-Vegas for the annual BadBlood New Year’s Day tournament, an event that I won in 2006 and have not experienced any real success in since then. I continued my streak, managing to save the least amount of face only by not busting first. I busted second. 24th out of 25 runners, that’s me.
But I did pretty well in the cash game, more than making up for my tournament buy-in, and Suzy’s as well. We played half No Limit Hold’Em, Half Pot Limit Omaha, with two $1 blinds. The original idea was to keep the game kinda reasonable, with a $100 max initial buy-in, and if you went busto you could rebuy for $200. That went out the window along about the second hour, and the cap was raised to $300 per reload . It turned into a wild game, with aggro play from TheMark, tight play from Special K, bad play from me that caught up, and generally a good time to be had by most. Depending on the hand. We all complimented BadBlood on his “This dad is so sick…” T-shirt that his son gave him for Christmas, and by the end of the night we had appended several different endings to the shirt title.
Pretty much all of my profit came from a couple of key hands, which is typical for my poker sessions, online or live. After gifting my first buyin to TheMark in a hand you’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear about, I reloaded for another hundred. In a round of Omaha, I woke up with kings and a couple of other crap cards, but I did have one suit with my kings. There was a raise in front of me from TheMark, I re-raised, and G-Rob pushed all in right behind me. TheMark called, and I put the last of my chips in the middle, figuring if I’ve run into aces, then I’m glad I brought more money. Turns out I had run into Queens and something else, as I showed my hand to take the main pot and don’t remember what Mark held, but it was better than G-Rob’s hand. So I tripled up and then had some chips to play around with.
Another big hand that featured me and Gucci Rick was probably one I played badly, but caught just enough on every street to stick around. I’m sure there was a raise preflop, and I called with Qd-9-Ad-x. The flop came down nine-high with two diamonds, so I had top pair, decent kicker and the nut flush draw. Rick bet out, and I called. The turn brought a queen, and I checked. Rick bet out again, and I moved all in over the top. It was about sixty bucks more for Rick to call, and he went deep into the tank before finally deciding that there was way too much money in the pot (over $400) for him to fold for another $58. He made the call and showed his flopped two pair. I had caught up, making a bigger two pair on the turn, and my hand held up to bring me up to profitable for the night. I ended up running Rick down another couple of times when straights hit on the river to take a significant chunk of his stack, and I was able to leave the game with a tidy profit, and a win over one of the better players in that game, in my opinion. Rick is one of those guys who up until last night has always had my number, betting me off hands when I have weak holdings and catching up when he needed to against me. But poker, she’s a fickle bitch, and last night things were running my way and I got out alive. It was a good way to start the year, and the first time in a couple of years I’ve been able to log a big win on the first day of the year.
Then we almost died on the ride home because of bad road conditions and a doucherocket on I-85, but that’s tomorrow’s story. Now go buy a book! And if you’ve bought a book, leave an Amazon review, they really do help!
