The flop in poker can make you sad, make you smile -- and sometimes make you smile a bit too soon. Consider what happened to us tonight at Lil Kim's Cove....
BLINDS: 25/50
IN THE POCKET: Q-10 offsuit
The tournament is only a couple of hands old, but we're at a table surrounded by players we know are good and successful. This is the first hand we play -- and after we toss in our 50, a man raises 300. We call, as do a few others.
ON THE FLOP: 10-8-7
Top pair of 10's? Didn't we see this somewhere before? To be honest, we did NOT remember last Thursday night when this came up. The player who raised is keeping us occupied, betting 500 ahead of us. We call.
ON THE TURN: 4
We still have top pair -- but the man ahead of us is still betting. He tosses in 500 more, and we join a couple of others in calling again.
ON THE RIVER: 3
The big bettor now throws in 1,000 -- and this is not one of the players we noted as good and successful. Did he make two pair? Has he been bluffing all along?
We dare to call 1,000, thinking it's a bluff -- only to discover he has pocket Kings. The "overpair" leaves us in despair.
That hand cost us a lot of chips, and we never got them back. In fact, we never won a hand all night. Tight play (along with large-scale wild betting by several others) allowed us to finish 17th, barely missing a semifinal table. Our last straw was going all-in with A-2, only to have nothing pair while another man made pairs.
MINISTRY MOMENT: The Big Dog Poker tournaments take a "color-up" break at the one-hour mark, as blinds increase to 500/1,000. We had enough smaller chips to earn one green chip for 500. When the man doing the conversion offered us a second one, we gave it back and noted he'd given us one before.
"I appreciate your honesty," said a man who had just taken a seat to our right.
"Just doing what I'm supposed to do," we answered. "Shouldn't people be honest all the time?"
"I don't know," the man says. He explained some people can be "brutally honest" -- even to the point that countries go to war against each other.
The man's point is a very insightful one. "Honesty needs to be mixed with something, doesn't it?" we said. "It needs to be mixed with love."
The man wasn't quite ready to go that far. He tried to draw a distinction between lying, "white lies" and "misdirecting" people.
What do you think of that? We'll analyze that some more in another post.
UPDATED POKER SCOREBOARD: 47 final tables in 112 nights (42.0%) - 10 cashes.
YAHOO POKER TOTAL: $13,816 - unchanged. (No play)
NBC SPORTS POKER TOTAL: Five-player sit-n-goes - 31-36-10-6-9. Full tournaments - 27 final tables in 221 games (12.2%), 3 cashes.
This apparently will be our final score from NBC Sports. While we've found no official announcement about it, the poker room's merger with National League of Poker seems to be permanent. At least we went out a winner there, with first place on Tuesday.
NATIONAL LEAGUE OF POKER TOTAL: Five-player sit-n-goes - 2-2-0-0-0. Full tournaments - 3 final tables in 8 games (37.5%), no cashes.
We finally played full tourneys at NLOP in the last few days -- and were surprised to make final tables the first two times, in fields of more than 140 players. Our best finish so far was seventh out of 50 today, which qualified us for a monthly "senior championship" in two weeks. (Yes, we're that old.)
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