Sunday, February 14, 2016

Poker Day 464: Queen's Best Friend

Still hoping to make the money at the most prestigious poker room in our area, we went to Kansas Star Casino today for its "Sunday Deep Stack" tournament. An $85 buy-in gets you 10,000 chips with slowly rising blinds. Turning that into big gains would be the challenge....

BLINDS: 50/100

IN THE POCKET: A-Q offsuit

We've won some hands and lost some hands - and the wins haven't been big enough to secure us a high chip stack. Our high for the day was about 12,400.  We receive these cards about midway around, in a ten-player game. We choose to limp, and about four players are in.

ON THE FLOP: Q-6-3 (as best we recall)

Top pair and top kicker seem nice.  Other players betting ahead of us seem nicer. One man offers 250; we're happy to call, as does a young man between us.

ON THE TURN: 10

We don't see much to fear with this - only now the play checks to us. It's our turn to bet 250, which chases one man away. But the young man calls; leaving us guessing about what he has. Does he have a Queen as well?

ON THE RIVER: 10

That complicates things a bit. What if he has a 10? We dare to bet 600 to find out, and he calls again.  Thankfully, he turns over Q-8. Our kicker takes a nice pot.

"They're similar," one person at the table points out. Well, yes - but Ace and 8 only go together if you're rhyming in a poker song.

We lasted more than two hours, but saw our stack slowly erode.  Pocket 8's gave us a nice comeback to more than 7,000 chips. But when we had K-K and a man raised to 3,300, we dared to go all-in - only to see him turn over pocket Aces! One of every poker player's worst nightmares came true for us. And while the flop was Q-10-9, we missed the Jack to escape with a straight.  We left the room in 44th place out of 64 players, with our goal still not met.

MINISTRY MOMENT: We went to the casino intentionally not to have one. But when someone came to the table with heart-shaped boxes of Valentine candy, we didn't take one, either.

What's that all about? Long-time blog readers should know the answer. For everyone else.... well, take a guess.. We'll explain in an upcoming post.

UPDATED POKER SCOREBOARD: 175 final tables in 464 games (37.7%) - 33 cashes. We're now two-for-four in making money from tournaments in 2016.

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