GO BONNIE!!!!
Ok, I am rather ashamed to admit that I spent most of the last five hours watching my sister-in-law play poker online. But I did. And she just won a tournament with some 1500 players and change. The buy in was $5.50 and she pocketed over $1400 for her win. She played beautifully, hit a garbage runner runner straight with pocket sevens against pocket kings to bust a guy. Though, truth be told, she had so many more chips than he did at that point - probably 30 players left or so then - that she wouldn't have been crippled with a loss there. Probably the key hand of the whole tournament, at least in terms of winning it, came with four players left. Bonnie was the chip leader, but not by a huge margin. Her stack seemed to hover around 900,000, with the others between 350,000 and 650,000. She was dealt pocket queens on the hand, and the guy in second chip position was dealt aces. She raised before the flop, and rather than reraise, he just called her, setting up the trap for later in the hand. (I like this play with pocket aces, especially when all but one hand has already folded. Bottom line is that with aces, you want to play a massive pot against one other player. You are basically a 4:1 favorite against almost any set of cards that doesn't contain an ace. So slow playing here makes as much sense as ever.) However, when the flop came with a Queen, it was all over and suddenly Bonnie had 1.5 million chips to the other stacks around 500,000. Nobody else ever made it over a million, and in the final hand, she had pocket kings against a KQ, which is basically the biggest favorite you can be in poker. The flop had a queen, but nothing else appeared to help the sucker, who was stuck with only $800 in winnings. Poor guy.
I didn't just watch poker. I have been participating in this doctoral study for a woman from Drake University, who is doing a qualitative study on young widows and widowers who lost their spouses to a long-term illness. I spent much of the night working on the questionaire that she sent me. The last question left to answer is: in what ways has widowhood transformed your life physically, economically, emotionally, and spiritually? I reckon I can whip out an answer to that in a couple of minutes tomorrow night. Sheesh.
Don't mess with the Monkey!
posted by Curtis Ruder @ 12:54 AM
3 Comments:
The interesting thing about that hand with the Queens is that there was basically no way either of them get away from that hand, and not simply because they both had such good hands. The guy with the aces had been so aggressive at the final table, there is no way that Bonnie lays down queens in that spot. Had it been a more conservative player, you would at least entertain the thought. There was no real way to put that guy on such a good hand at that point. And then certainly, when she hit trips, that was that.
It is also worth mentioning that she played queens the textbook way. When she got them, she waved at the screen and said "Hellllloooooooo Ladies" in a seductive voice. Anything less is asking for loss.
Which begs an important question: do you just fold queens at a live table since you presumably cannot say, "Hellllloooooo Ladies?" Or is just saying it internally satisfactory to the poker idols? It is hard enough to ever get away from queens, but against an aggressive player at a four handed table, there just is no way, surely not before the flop. A flop of an ace and another big bet, then perhaps.
That player I thought was the second best at the table - to Bonnie, of course - because while he had to be aggressive in order to play as many pots as he did, every time he turned his cards over he had good ones. Which is intimidating.
Actually, I usually just say "Helllloooo Ladies" out loud in a live game. As you well know, nobody takes what anyone says seriously. Most of the time, you can just tell people exactly what you have and they will still bet into it. Granted, you know I do this, so I have to be clever about it when I do it to you.
And righto, it is damn near impossible to get away from queens at a 4-person table. Although, I think it could have been done. Bonnie and I were talking, and we basically agreed that you should fold almost anything if one of the guys moved all in... I mean, with all the chips stacks being relatively equal, it is too easy to put someone on AK when you have QQ, so why get yourself into a coinflip situation when you can wait... but that guy was a good player.
I also appreciated that he didn't whine like a little girl when he took that beat. Rather, he admitted that they both had great hands, and Bonnie played it extremely well, setting a trap on him when he thought he was the one setting a trap. It was good to see everyone being nice at the end of such a tournament, when all of the final table had obviously played pretty well along the way.
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