BLINDS: 400/800
IN THE POCKET: A-J offsuit
The first hour of play was mostly lower for us, although we turned pocket Jacks into three of a kind which eliminated a player. We reached the final table with 8,900 chips out of a starting 12,000.
Now we're down to 5,000 chips in the Small Blind, with nine players left. We have pretty good cards and no one has raised, but we play conservatively and simply call. We recall four players being in the hand.
ON THE FLOP: 10-4-Q (middle card not precise)
That's why we played cautiously. We miss the flop, although we have a big straight draw. We check, but the Big Blind bets 2,000. Other players bail out, leaving us with a big decision. After pondering a moment, we decide on a power play.
"All of it," we declare - raising to 4,200. As a small stack, we don't have much to lose. If the Big Blind calls, we have about 10 outs. If not, at least we made another final table.
Our opponent spends a good deal of time thinking about this. Did we read a bluff correctly? When we think he's about to fold, he calls.
"Do you have a pair?" we ask with a bit of concern.
"Yeah," he says, "but not much of one." He turns over 2-2! So yes, he bluffed - but we have two very live cards.
ON THE TURN: 4
No, that wasn't it. One chance left.
ON THE RIVER: K
"Yes!" we say and pump our arm in victory. But for a moment, the female dealer doesn't grasp it. We're sitting to her immediate left, and she's hard of hearing in her left ear!
Other players point out the straight we made. We stay alive, and return to more than 10,000 chips.
The final table was relatively tight, and it took a long time to whittle down the field. But we took a player out with K-J, and received a 9 in the Big Blind which turned into quads!
We held on until four players were left. But after more than three hours of play, rising blinds finally were too expensive. We pushed in the Big Blind with Q-2. A woman called with K-6, and won the race when two more Kings hit the board. We finish fourth out of 14 players - the third time in six tournaments there that we've finished fourth! Too bad only the top two earned money.
MINISTRY MOMENT: A man sitting to our left won a pot with an A-5 straight, known in poker as the "wheel."
"There's an old song about that," we told him. "Ezekiel saw the wheel.... in the middle of the air."
The man seemed intrigued for a moment, but then became distracted by other players and hands. But are you familiar with that song? It's a "spiritual" that we sang in our youth, and it has its basis in the Bible....
As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with his four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. - Ezekiel 1:15-16
What's going on here? The prophet Ezekiel is having "visions of God" (verse 1) - and he sees "what looked like four living creatures" (verse 5). Another section of his account helps explain....
The Lord said to the man clothed in linen, "Go in among the wheels beneath the cherubim. Fill your hands with burning coals from among the cherubim and scatter them over the city." And as I watched, he went in. - Ezekiel 10:2
So Ezekiel is watching "cherubim" in action - what our old hardbound dictionary calls "the second order of angels." It's quite different from the traditional pictures of cute angels. And one thing more about those wheels....
Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around. - Ezekiel 1:18
Who needs "dash-cams" inside your car when you have eyeballs on wheels? And more to our point, what could all this possibly mean for us? Offer a comment if you'd like, and we'll get back to this section (and that song) in a future post.
UPDATED POKER SCOREBOARD: Tonight we mark 11 years of playing live tournaments - and we stand at 198 final tables in 541 games (36.6%), with 40 cashes. Since moving to our new area, the final table count is six out of eight!
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