Poker Night 184: Lie to Me

"This man is the comeback master," a woman said tonight at Lil Kim's Cove. Thankfully, she was pointing toward us -- and doing it at the final table. We actually had to make two comebacks during the tournament....

BLINDS: 50/100

IN THE POCKET: 10-10

We lost a promising hand early in the game, and sit with about 3,900 chips. Here's an opportunity to recover -- but we're early in the betting order, so we limp. A man to our left wearing a Chicago White Sox baseball cap raises to 1,000. We call; no one else does.

ON THE FLOP: Q-9-7 (unsure exactly what the last two cards were, but they were small)

We check to the raiser -- and he bets 1,000 again. We've faced this man at Lil Kim's Cove before, and know he could be tossing out chips with almost anything. We smell a bluff, and call.

"How much do you have left?" Mr. Sox asks us.

We count our stack. It's 1,800.

ON THE TURN: 3

We check again, almost knowing what's coming -- "1,800." He bets either to put us all-in, or chase us away.

We're still not fully persuaded our opponent has us topped. We think he's trying to scare us, and be a "table bully." So after thinking a moment, we call.

ON THE RIVER: 4

"Pair of Tens?!" we say uncertainly as we show what we have. Mr. Sox smiles, shakes his head as if to say no -- and throws in his cards without showing them. We still don't know what he had. But we read him correctly, and our stack jumps as a result to more than 7,300.

(This was a clash of two players with reputations around the table. One man went against form; the other did not. We'll talk more about that in an upcoming post.)

Meanwhile, a big loss hurt us later on -- and we stood at only 3,000 chips in the second hour. But then came that second comeback.

It started with a push, which won with a pair of Kings. Then we were dealt pocket Aces, pushed again and tripled our stack to more than 12,000. Then we were dealt 7-7, and a third 7 came on the flop! This meant another push, another big gain -- and a nice stack going to the final table. We held on to finish fifth, finally losing when a desperation push with Q-4 lost to a pair of Kings.

MINISTRY MOMENT: For the first time in several weeks, we took our little plastic sword to the tournament. We told a fellow player it was a reminder the Word of God is "sharper than a two-edged sword" (Hebrews 4:12).

"Do you read the Bible?" we asked the man.

"Not as much as I used to," he admitted. "I'm a Christian. I believe in Jesus. I just don't read it as much as I used to."

We encouraged him to make Bible reading a regular part of his day. "You might be surprised, what you find in there," we noted. We'll talk more about that in a future post, too.

UPDATED POKER SCOREBOARD: 77 final tables in 184 nights (41.8%) - 15 cashes. We've had top-five finishes in two of our last four live tournaments, and four of the last ten.

NATIONAL LEAGUE OF POKER TOTAL: Full tournaments - 68 point wins in 364 games (18.7%), 29 final tables, 1 cash.

We made the final table earlier in the day in a large tournament -- finishing tenth out of 467 players. (Only the top five won money.) That followed a fourth-place finish out of 229 players Tuesday afternoon.

POKER STARS.NET TOTAL: Full tournaments - 0/4. Pretend cash games - $10,709, down $152.