Tao of Poker

Saturday NL Party with Al Can't Hang & Signor Ferrari

I hit the tables this morning on Party Poker and guess who joined my table a few minutes into my session? Al Can't Hang... he tracked me down! He was just in time too to see me get knocked around by a slew of bad beats. Big Slick was taken down by J-9. I had K-Q in the lil blind and flopped two pair only to lose to a river straight. I was really pissed when my Cowboys fell victim to a Q-5. But I held my cool like Walt Clyde Frazier, and waited for a good hand to play.

In the middle of those bad beats, one guy at our table got pocket aces 3 times in less than thirty minutes. He staretd with $25 and was well over $150 in a matter of minutes. Insane, indeed.

I discovered that Signor Ferrari was playing a NL ring game and invited him to our table. He showed up right away and I had Ferrari to my right a few seats and Al Can't Hang in the corner on my left. I was pretty pumped to play with those guys online.

The Hand of the Week: QQ vs. AK

I forgot who said it in their book (TJ, Sklanasky, Doyle?)... but I'm paraphrasing here something to the effect of:

You have to win pots with AK and you also have to beat AK to win bigger pots.

Al Can't Hang is the LB. UTG raises 50cents. I reraised to $2 with Q-Q. The button called and the LB reraised $5 more to make ita $7 preflop bet. I let all my time expire before I called him. For some reason I felt he had AK or JJ. I dunno why I thought that. I called and was a little worried when the button called as well.

The flop: 8-8-Q.

Nice, very nice. Monster nice. UTG bet $1. I called. Button went all-in. UTG called and I reraised all in my stack and UTG called that. I beat out AK and the button didnt show his hand. The guy had the balls to write: Nice catch in the chat. I had him beat preflop. He didn't have to call my re-raise to put him all-in. What a tool. It was a $65 pot. Nice, monster nice. Taking down Big Slick with the Ladies.

I won a pot heads up with Ferrari when my 99 took out his A9. Both guys weren't getting anything and I got badbeated a few more times and my stack dwindled. Of course, I got ambushed with a fullboat. I walked into it blindly like a dumb, hungry mouse trying to fetch a morsel of cheese in a gluetrap. I was playing against I guy who I pegged for a big time bluffer (in previous games over the last two weeks), and the one time he had the nuts... I called him. Bad play. I had a straight and I figured he missed his flush draw. He took me once again after he flopped a set and slowplayed me.

I was happy with the call against AK so a loss today isn't so bad considering I think I took my worst barrage of bad beats ever on Party Poker... all within a 3 hour span. I had great cards too... plenty of AK, AQ, AJ and tons of medium pairs.

Al Can't Hang lost his buyin. Signor Ferrari had a nice rush. He had AA and QQ inside of a few hands and took some money off of the big stack on the table. When I left he looked like he was doing a little better. I dropped $8/hr playing NL ring games today. But... it's always cool to play with Ferrari and Al Can't Hang.