Wanna know how you can tell you're a true "poker media" professional? Okay, maybe it's an oxymoron, but let's run with it anyway. The answer... it's when you can't find time to play the game, despite the fact that you're immersed in it on a daily basis. Still, I've managed to visit online sites twice this past week, which was two more than the last three weeks combined.
First, thanks again to Bodog for the ongoing Bodonkey (a/k/a Bodog Bloggerment) series, which this week featured not one but two guest pros in David Williams and Jean-Robert Bellande. I had DW on my right for a while before he chose to mix it up and was bounced. Must've been the pizza delivery guy. Odd story, Part 1: DW got all the chips in pre-flop with A-4x, from EP. Odd story, Part 2: He actually started out ahead, since the other player made the call with K-Q. A queen flopped and a bounty was awarded. I bounced myself out a while later trying to make a re-steal from the big blind, against the chip leader in the small blind, who I thought was trying to push me around. He got my chips.
Tonight I fired up the poker.com software for the first time in several weeks, just in time for the nightly $2,500 Guarantee. Darned if I didn't take the thing down:
So it wasn't a total washout of a month for poker after all. What was odd in this one is how I won it. I am -- and you can take this to the bank -- a lousy tourney frontrunner. I've won this and several other tourneys on the site multiple times each, and never once have I taken a commanding lead and ridden it through to the end. My victories have always been come-from-behind-jobs, and on the occasions I've had big leads in the middle stages, I've never closed the deal.
Until tonight. I moved near the lead with about 30 of the 77 starters still around, and then into the lead with about 17 players leading, after convincing a LAGgy player that I was really bluffing with a sizable overbet after a 7-high flop, something like 6,500 into a 4,000 pot. I'd made a standard 3x raise pre-flop from the button, and he decided to defend with J-7x. Fortunately, I had aces and he bit... hard. I stacked up some more when I pushed hard with A-K on a K-high flop against a player who had K-J and couldn't make himself release top pair. I was in the big blind in that hand and put in a healthy raise before the flop, but the guy apparently loved his K-J. Me, I can't stand the hand, and will only play it for cheap and in position.
From there it was a bit of bullying the short stacks as the bubble loomed (chipping up from maybe 50,000 to 65,000 there), and then riding out a cold spell of about six laps once the final table began.
Soon enough I picked up a few hands again and kept getting paid off. A fun poker night is when you keep getting the chips in ahead and your cards hold up time after time. That was this one in a nutshell. No one got close to me until only four players remained, and my rush continued right on through to the end. Third place went out when we both hit a flop hard, me with top two and him with bottom two. I had a 5:1 chip advantage starting heads-up play, and two hands later this player pushed with an open-ended draw and I called with top pair. Again, it held up.
Sometimes poker runs your way, if only for a short while. Such was this night.
Thursday night I'm going to show up on Rounders Radio as Lou Krieger's guest. We'll probably do what we've done when I was on his earlier Hold'em Radio show with he and Amy, and that's go free-form and talk about whatever subject pops into mind. Ad lib! Ad lib!
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