[mrmuzeman]

The 7th hour (continued)


In mid position another hand came my way and I was hitting a card rush now. Pocket Queens, QQ in mid position. A new Scandy moved from another table due to the depleting field raised to 1.5K in early position, perfect I thought. When it came to me I moved all in without any thought for around 4.5K it must have been. They all folded rounded to the raising Scandy. He thought for a long time and took off his glasses. I sat staring blankly ahead at a particular spot on table with my elbows on the table and my head propped up on my fists under my chin. A kind of Phil Hellmuth style pose if you will. I did it because I could physically feel the pulse in both sides of my neck beating and I didn’t want to show that I was nervous. I’ve looked in the mirror at home before and noticed that it actually is quite noticeable when your pulse is really going hell for leather. He thought for a full minute so I really wanted a call hopefully from Jacks or Tens or something like that. Finally he said ‘Ok lets go’ and flipped over AQo. Disco! All I had to do was dodge an Ace. I believe that the ‘lets go’ comment meant he must have thought I had a pair JJ or below. I showed 88 before, maybe that had an impact – I’d like to think so.

So like my last all in I had to sweat one card out, an Ace. The QQ held up as a 69% favourite the whole way (my AK v A10 was also a 69% fave by the way) and I had a little over 10K. Sweeeet.

The guy who called me with the AQ there I later learned his nickname was ‘Eskobet’. He ended up all in soon after that hand with 66 vs AJ as I took half his chips that hand and he was short stacked. He won the coinflip and went on to finish second in the whole tournament collecting around $250,000 I believe. This, for me, shows the finelines between success and failure in tournament poker. Half the time that guy would have gone out in around 150th place but instead went onto great heights. I’m sure he made some very good decisions after that along the way but still it’s a eye opener to the huge luck factor contained in any one tournament.

Continuing my card rush thick and fast after the AA and QQ I picked up the missing part of the poker puzzle in pocket Kings (or Kevin Kilbane as its otherwise known). It was in early position and I raised to 1.5K, a raise of just under 4 big blinds. A standard raise to disguise my strength. The grey haired Irishman who had been moved to our table a while back re-raised a further 3K to 4.5K. You gotta love that with KK and it folded all the way back to me. I looked at my stack and had about 8.5K left. So I had 2 options. Call and leave myself with 5.5K at the back and move all in whatever the flop came. Or I could move all in now. With the pot standing at around 7K I decided that was a good pot to take down if he did indeed fold and announced all in just ushering my hands forward in a waving motion rather than physically moving the chips in. The players at the table all let out ‘oohs’ and ‘aaahs’ of surprise and excitement at the re-raise of a re-raise. The other 2 reasons I thought moving in pre flop there was the best play was because I was out of position on the flop and I did honestly though I would get called by a worse hand. The pot after my all in contained around 15.5Kish and the guy only had to call a further 5.5K so was getting not far off 3/1 odds. The sort of hands that re-raise there, big pocket pairs (hopefully JJ or QQ and not AA in this case!) and AK will certainly call this.

He thought for a long time. I decided to put my jumper up and over my face to hide away like the Phil “Unabomber” Laak does in the World Poker Tour episode I’ve seen as it was pretty funny when he did it. It provided a welcome break from the tension as the players including the Irishman thinking whether to call were laughing at my protective shell. The photographer came over to take a picture as well, which I actually found slightly embarrassing and I pulled my jumper back down a bit! My actions actually had a dual purpose however, as the pulses in my neck were again beating like fuck again whilst hoping for a call. The very fact he even was thinking for a more than a nano-second meant I had him crippled. He eventually asked me ‘Do ya want me to call ye?’ in his Irish accent. I revealed myself and said as calmly as I could a reassured slow ‘Yep’ then went into hiding again. The players laughed again and one said ‘I bet you didn’t expect him to say that!’. It all ended rather un-dramatically though when he folded and showed an Ace. He said he had AJ – nice hand to re-raise with buddy!

My stack was in excess of 15K and I was feeling mighty hyped up and feeling good.