Andy Glazer’s Walking Back To Reno

My journey to the Peppermill in 1999 was mostly supposed to be a fun road trip with Phil and his two kids-who are really great kids.  I’d never taken a four-hour drive with two kids before, and I learned that all those clichés about poker kids asking “Are we there yet?” are true.

            As it turns out, Phil and I both made the final table of the $300 buy-in no-limit Hold’em tour event, and I was pretty excited because we’d never been at the same final table before.  I was really hoping it would come down to the two of us, but Phil never picked up any hands and wound up going out seven card stud when his big reraise with his Ah-Kh got moved in on by his opponent’s pocket queens.  There was too much money in the pot to let it go at that point, and Phil lost the coin flip.

            Eventually, I got heads-up with Sam Caliva, a nice fellow from Houston, with a chip lead of about $70,000 to $56,000.  I kept thinking how grateful I was that I had learned a few things about heads-up poker in the initial World Heads-up Poker Championship, and also wishing that I had played a few more of the events, because I knew there was lots more I didn’t know!

            The poker tournament came down to two big hands.  On the first, with the blinds at $2,000-$4,000,  Sam had the big blind, and I looked down from the small blind to see pocket sixes.  I raised it to $11,000 total (I had been holding my raises to a consistent size), and Sam decided to come over the top of me for another $28,000).

            I a long time.  This was the first time Sam had come over the top of me in maybe 45 minutes of heads-up play, and although I’d win the tournament if my sixes held up, I’d have been handing him a two-to-one chip lead if they didn’t.  I’m not a big fan of calling big raises with small pairs.  If my opponent has a bigger pair than my pair, then I’m a huge dog, and even if it’s a move with two over card games like 10-9, we still have a coin flip.

            I laid it down.  After the tournament, Sam told me that he’d been feeling desperate and had made the move with K-2.  The old “re-sulto-spectro-scope” had me wishing I’d called, but I still think I’d lay it down again.  (I’ll have to see what Phil thinks.)

            The second big hand that I played was my big lesson limit stud.  I had been trying to set up a trap, doing  a bit more limping in than I’d normally do because Sam hadn’t been raising my limps, and I thought I could nail him if I picked up a big hand.  Unfortunately, nothing exciting arrived, but hey, winning a no-limit tournament is supposed to be about moving your chips well, not catching a lot of cards.

            Anyway, I finally found my trap hand, A-K, and limped in from the small blind.  Sam checked, and the flop came 4-5-9.  He checked this flop, and I had my second brain freeze of the final table (the first was worse, more like a hallucination than a brain freeze, but fortunately it cost me only a few chips) and moved in spooky hand.  He called, pretty quickly, with 4-7.  An ace did come on the river, but a second four had already hit on the turn, and I was down to about $11,000 in had already hit on the turn, and I was down to about $11,000 in chips, which didn’t last long with the blinds $3,000-$6,000.

            Although I’ve found any number of rationalizations for the play, the best being that Sam had shown an unwillingness to call big bets after the flop with anything less than top pair, I still think the play is bad coming and going.

            A-K isn’t good trapping hand heads-up, because if an ace or a king hits the flop it’s hard to get an opponent to call any sort of large bet; and if the ace or king doesn’t hit, any sort of random hand, like Sam’s 4-7, can quickly turn into a favorite.  The concept of setting up the trap was fine, but it works much better with a stand-alone hand like J-J.

            Meanwhile, after the flop, I relied too much on Sam’s prior unwillingness to call big bets.  I had a slight chip lead, and there was no need to put most of my chips at risk like that, when there was only $12,900 in the pot limit omaha.

            They used to call A-K “walking back to Houston” in the old Texas road games, because so many players went broke with it.  It broke both Phil and me that day, although he went out raising pre-flop with his and I went out betting post-flop with mine, a very big difference.  It was even a guy from Houston who sent me walking with it that day!

I’ll tell you one thing, though; it’s a lot easier to write about these tournaments than it is to play poker card games in them!