March Home Game

As I may have mentioned before, I play a monthly poker night with the guys - we usually have between 6 and 10 guys and play as many NLHE tournaments in an evening as we can. Last night we got in 5 of them:

$10 buy-in, 11 players, split $70 / $40
$20 buy-in, 11 players, split $120 / $80 / $20
$20 buy-in, 10 players, split $120 / $60 / $20
$20 buy-in, 8 players, split $90 / $50 / $20
$20 buy-in, 8 players, split $90 / $50 / $20

(the 2nd and 3rd tournaments I may have the payout slightly wrong on. If they are, I'm sure poker1eh will correct me.....)

The lesson of the night came in the last two games. That lesson is patience - you never have too few chips to win. Sounds cliche to say "chip and a chair", but......

In the next-to-last game, I believe I played a grand total of 3 hands or so before I was heads up at the end. My chip stack was approximately where it started, and thus my opponent had me outstacked by 7-1. Came back to win it.

In the last game, I came up on the wrong end of an AK vs QJ pre-flop all-in from a true maniac who had pushed all in with regularity with almost anything. He hit his J, and I had no help which left me crippled with only 175 chips and 5 players left. There were total 26000 chips in play, and the blinds were 200 / 400. So not only did I have well under 1% of the chips in play, but I couldn't even post a full small blind. Very long story very short, I came back and won. Obviously to come back from that sort of deficit you have to have a ton of luck, but I also think I was as patient as I could be, once I built the stack back up to the point I could survive a few rounds.

The final results of the evening were 2 wins and a second out of the 5 tourneys, leaving me $170 in the black for the evening. Not bad.

For all of you who may think online poker is rigged - I saw just as many (if not more) brutal beats and big hand vs. big hand than on any poker site I've been on. Off the top of my head:

• Nut flush vs. two pair, all in on the turn. Two pair hit their 4-outer boat on the river.
• Middle set vs. overpair, all in on the flop. Overpair hits their 2-outer on the river.
• QQ vs Ax on AQy board. Ax hits runner-runner Aces for quads.
  
• AJ vs K7 on AKJ board, all-in on the flop. AJ was a 90% favorite (according to Poker Stove), but lost when the 2-outer K got there. (I think this is correct - the AJ was poker1eh's hand, and I'm sure he has a better recollection of it than I do)
• KK vs. AQ. Board comes KJT single suited. Set vs. made straight. Only thing that was missing was the made flush. For the record, the KK made a boat.

These all happened in a span of 7 hours of live play, so all this was in a span of 300-400 hands, at most.

Can't wait until the April game!