Poker Night 221: You Look Familiar

If you play poker on a regular basis, you know history can repeat itself. Pocket Aces can come in consecutive hands. And card patterns you saw weeks or months ago can come up again. That sort of thing happened for us tonight at The Red Barn -- and perhaps we should have known better:

BLINDS: 50/100

IN THE POCKET: 10-K offsuit

We bought dinner to go with our soda tonight, which meant 6,000 bonus chips off the top. Then we won an early pot, so we have about 13,000 chips. That makes this hand easy to call -- and when a man to our left raises to 500, we're willing to call. About five players at the table give it a try.

ON THE FLOP: 10-9-9

We have two pair, but wonder what that man who raised has. We check. He bets 1,000. We call, as does one other player.

ON THE TURN: 9

Now we have a full house -- but we also have a flashback to another night at The Red Barn. We won a big pot last June with "Jacks over tens," when two other players had "tens over Jacks." Could something like this be coming back around to bite us?

Given all this, we check. The man to the left bets another 1,000. Other players fold.

"You realize that quads are worth a 5,000 chip bonus," we say to the man. We hear one woman guess we have the quads, but we're actually saying this in hopes of "reading" a response from our opponent. We've never seen this man at The Red Barn before. He doesn't give any clues, leading us to think our hand is good. So we call.

ON THE RIVER: Q

We check once more. Now our opponent bets 2,000. Part of our brain is screaming "fold!", but we've committed a lot of chips to this pot. "I'll make him prove it," we say in calling.

"I've got a boat," the man says. And our flashback proves accurate -- as he has 10-10. His "tens over nines" beat our "nine over tens." We should have known better.

That cost us a lot, but we won a pot before the one-hour break to rebuild to 10,500. Then we escaped an all-in moment with Q-4 by making an A-10 straight! That lifted us to the final table -- but the good cards ended there. Forced to go all-in at the big blind with A-J, the board didn't pair while another player made a pair. We hopefully learned a lesson, while finishing sixth.

MINISTRY MOMENT: After a player won a huge pot in the first hand, the man who dealt the cards offered a plea: "Tip the dealer?!?!"

Those tips are commonplace in real poker rooms, but seldom happen in free games. Yet this gave us an opportunity to speak up. "I've got a tip for you. Love your neighbor as yourself."

The dealer agreed that was a good tip -- and it comes from a very good source:

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. -- Leviticus 19:18

You may be familiar with Jesus using that expression, in places such as Matthew 22:39. But the concept has its origin in the Old Testament, and God's instructions to Moses. That shows how timeless the idea of loving your neighbor is. May that continue with you in 2011 -- for instance, by not holding grudges against other players.

UPDATED POKER SCOREBOARD: 91 final tables in 221 nights (41.2%) - 15 cashes.