Got Unstuck

So I’ve not played much online this weekend. That was the plan anyway – grind, grind, grind Monday to Friday and relax some at the weekend.

So what did I do to relax? Well, I played some live poker of course!

Saturday night started out well – up a few buy-ins in the first half hour! Then the following hand came up (1-2PL):

I have AQ of clubs in middle position and raise the pot to £13 (three limpers in front of me). Drunken guy on my left re-raises to £26 – he has about £250 behind and I have him covered. Now there’s no reason to put this guy on a really big hand since he’s been talking some trash and I know he’s coming after me. So I just call and see the flop:

Q – 5 – 2 two diamonds.

Perfect.

I check to let him bet. Sure enough he ‘pots’ it - £61. Now I’m pretty comfortable with my hand in this spot against such an opponent, but just be sure I tank it up for a minute to see if I can get a read. The guy is staring me down so badly! I mean I look at him and he looks back even harder. Under the table his legs are shaking. The guy is drunk too, so all of this could mean nothing. I think about just calling for a second and checking the turn, but my call will look strong and I hate giving free cards. Then again, if he has any sort of hand at all, he’s not laying it down. The SPR (stack-to-pot ratio) is just over 3 – plenty enough for top pair/top kicker against this opponent. So I raise all-in for his other 190 pounds and he snap calls! I turn over AQ and he turns over JJ. Wow! Early Christmas! Well it was until the dealer flipped the turn card…another jack and he takes down the £560 pot!

That was just the start. A few coolers later and I’m down a few buy-ins or so. Normally I wouldn’t mind so much, but the game was REALLY good and I was desperate to take advantage of that; especially since I was down from my last live session too. I even changed seat to have position on the drunken fish that two-outed me. And remember: he’s sitting with almost £600 now! He wasn’t the only one either; there were a whole group of them and they’d each turned their initial £50 buy-in into a few hundred!

After one of them cracked my pocket kings with 67 off-suit he actually got up and left! Good for him really – it was his first time in a casino and probably his first time playing poker. The knock on effect, however, was all the ‘hit and run’ banter. This caused Mr. Jack-Jack to start playing scared money – he really didn’t want to lose his winnings, and especially not to me as now I was back to about £500 pounds again and sitting directly to his left. I was in almost all of his pots and stole about £200 back from him due to his new weak-tight nature.

Finally they all left; most of them still up a few quid. I was about to go home too – about 100 pounds down – until I noticed the 5-5 game was only 4-handed. As an added bonus there were two live ones, one weak-tight regular, and only one decent player. Needless to say – I was in.

We only got to play for about 45 minutes until the game broke, but I did manage to run them over for a few hundred quid. I ended up finishing +£115 for the night. Phew.

After that, I’ll not even bother explaining what happened today. But I did play the tournament. And I did bust out to runner-runner flush…again.

It’s Monday tomorrow – back to the grind.