#10 Downer Street

I meant to add this to the end of the last post because it’s an excellent lesson in come-uppance or the turn of the worm or something. Certainly it’s an example of why you have to have the ability to stand back from your game and see how your own setbacks fall into the patterns established by players before you.

It had been only a few hours since I’d seen the remarkable self-destruction of the giant stack in the guarantee game and I was in another sub-rung of the EPT Steps competition. I’d had a very lucky triple up early on when three of us drawing four to a straight came up short and my ace kicker paired on the turn. After a few smaller wins I’d doubled up to more than 11K cleaning out three smaller stacks after a [jd] on the river gave me trips. A little up and down around that level and then another pair of jacks got me up to 15,200.

The way the Steps Special tournament is structured, there are only 111,000 chips in play among 111 starting players. At the end, those will be spread out among nine players, averaging about 12,333 each. Some players would have more—maybe a lot more—but as long as you have one chip when the player in 10th place is eliminated, you get the Step A ticket. So this is the spot I should have started folding pretty much everything and let the smaller players slug it out, at least until it looked like I might be a little light for a few rounds of blinds.

Instead, I gambled on a [tc th] and lost 900 above my small blind (300) and ante (50). A little later I went to showdown with [kc ts] and lost 2,600 extra chips. Tossed 1,200 away with [5s 7s] (admittedly, I was in 400 for the small blind on that one). Seriously? I was down more than 8K in eleven hands but the blinds had only touched me twice in that time.

I was down to 7BB but if I’d  looked at the other totals I could probably have still made it through to the winner’s circle. Instead, I went all-in for 4,740 with [5h qh] and lost, going out on the bubble and probably making the stacks under me (there were a couple!) very happy.

Feeling the Disconnect

It was wild and wooly outside this afternoon with lots of wind and rain coming down all over the Pacific Northwest. I started playing another EPT Steps 15 FPP Special tournament and two hands in my connection died. I don’t know if it was the weather or something in my local network for sure but I managed to get back in only to have things go sour again just as I tried to call a raise with a pocket pair of kings from UTG+1. By the time I hooked up an Ethernet cord to my cable modem, that hand was long gone and I was down to 895 chips from the starting stack of 1,000, with the big blind of 100 about to take another chunk out. On the 75 chip small blind the next hand I pulled [ac 4s] and went all-in over another all-in of 60 chips and the big blind of 150. The big blind folded, an [as] hit on the flop and that was good enough to put me back up over the starting stack.

Two rounds later the blinds were at 100/200 and I was dealt [kc 7c] in the UTG+1 position. I went all in for 1,005, the next player to act raised all-in to 1,860, and everyone else folded. He flipped over [as kc] but the cards came out [5c 3s 8s] [2s] [jc] and I got some breathing space with 2,285 chips.

Six hands later at 150/300/25 I got [7c 7h]. Not a pair that’s the best to play nine-handed, particularly from my UTG position but I put in 300. UTG+1 went all-in for 1,872 and it folded around to the big blind who pushed everything in for 2,960. I was completely covered but called. The flop was [6s 7d 7s], which left me in pretty good shape. The big blind with [ad ks] was out of luck but there was a minimal chance that UTG+1’s [td jd] could turn into a straight flush, at least until [tc] came on the turn. I took in 7,852.

Someone else’s middle pocket pair was my downfall, when I paired a [td] with the top card on the board at the turn and [6h 6c] tripped up with [6s]. Out in seventeenth position.