After several recent online losses through longshot river cards, we concluded it's vital to respond to the turn card properly. If you have a good hand, don't wait -- do something to win the pot then and there. That lesson was reinforced to us tonight at Lil Kim's Cove....
BLINDS: 100/200
IN THE POCKET: 10-7 offsuit
We're in the small blind at a table of five, and standard calling occurs around us. Holding 5,600 chips, we call.
ON THE FLOP: Q-7-4.
We have middle pair. That's OK, but not too thrilling. We check, as does everyone else.
ON THE TURN: 7.
Aha! We have three of a kind, sit first in line to bet -- and it's a good time to bet. We throw in 500. One man calls; the others fold.
ON THE RIVER: 8.
The cards are offsuit. What could go wrong? We bet 1,100.
"I'm all in," the man to our left says -- and he has more than 6,000 in his stack. Huh?! What could he have? Based on how the table has played, we conclude he has a Queen or a pocket pair -- still only two pair.
"All I have is 3,900," we say as we call.
"I've got a straight," the opponent declares. He has 5-6 -- and hit an open-ended draw on the river. To be honest, it was a straight possibility we never saw.
Should we have bet more on the turn -- maybe 1,500 or 2,000? Looking back, it might have chased that opponent off his draw. But we wanted to maximize our gain from this hand. Trouble is, we wound up minimizing it -- to the max. We finish 17th, on a night with only about 25 players.
MINISTRY MOMENT: We won a big all-in pot earlier this week at NBC Sports. As we recall, our A-9 topped an opponent's K-Q. The opponent then wrote we logically should NOT have called his big bet. That led to this exchange:
Me: I'm sorry.
roket88: i forgive you
roket88: this time
Me: May God bless you for a forgiving heart.
roket88: amen
Forgiveness -- it's a good thing. We think it beats holding grudges at a poker table. The apostle Paul put it this way in Ephesians 4:32: "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you."
UPDATED POKER SCOREBOARD: 41 final tables in 102 nights (40.2%) - 9 cashes.
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