Rob slowly rolled over T8 for the busted open-ender. Power poker, bitches.
I am loathe to admit this, but for the first time ever, I developed a small man-crush on G-Rob.
Guard went into a slow burn after that and started working to try to get his money back from Rob. The last straw was calling a big raise from Rob and flopping a flush with with Q7 of spades. By the time the river came, Rob had made a king-high flush with his pocket kings.
Guard cashed out as did a couple of others.
The game started changing after that and settled into the second line-up of the night.
Seat 1: Unknown (talkative guy, likely 50 with white hair and a weight problem)
Seat 2: Unknown (missing one tooth, likely late situs online 40s, dark hair, sorta fat, with a piece of gold bling around his neck)
Seat 3: Christy Snow (pretty MILF)
Seat 4: Dominoes The Pizza Guy
Seat 5: Twirly the Cable Guy (not sure if he is really a cable guy, but I get the impression he is. Thought I saw a cable work shirt on the back of his chair. Brown visor, cheap sunglasses)
Seat 6: Otis
Seat 7: Snow’s husband
Seat 8: Muhammad’s brother
Seat 9: Muhammad
Seat 10: G-Rob
An hour had passed and I hadn’t opened a pot. As often happens, I started to get bored and put in a live stradle.
“Otis…”
G-Rob seemed to sense my state of mind. He’s seen it before and likely (and rightly) feared I was about to start playing badly.
Muhammad (note: not a reference to his ethnicity or religion) raised it up to 3x my straddle. Three people called before it got to me. I looked down at 5s7s and muttered, “What the fuck.”
I called to see a flop of 25T, two spades. I put out a bet that was maybe 1/3 of the pot and only Muhammad called. My plan to thin the field had worked, but now I feared Muhammad was on two big spades. Even if my pair of fives was still good, the flush I wanted may not be.
And then the most beautiful thing happenend. The five of hearts fell on the turn. I bet out, hoping Muhammad would give up on his flush.
And then something changed. Muhammad raised me all but about $70 of my stack. My flush draw read, I decided, was way off. Buddha had to be sitting on a pair. I thought for about thirty seconds before saying, “Well, I guess it is going all-in on the river anyway.” I pushed in all my money.
Now, Muhammad went in the tank. No flush draw, no five, for sure. I almost started kicking myself for driving him out of the pot. And then, thank you Muhammad, he called.
He never showed, but he said he had pocket nines. He had two outs and missed. I doubled up and started to get happy-happy.
About ten minutes later, Twirly came in for a raise. He’s a tight guy and I made a decision early on to not play many pots with him. But then I looked down to find pocket kings.
You’ll remember this moment from a game a few weeks ago…
—-
As the game started to get short-handed (G-Rob and BadBlood had left), I picked up pocket kings in the cutoff. With two limpers to me, I made a standard raise. The button called. Sitting in the big blind, one of the house players re-raised. While the guys has a fairly wide range of starting hands, he’s more of a calling station than re-raiser, so I put him on something big (AA,KK,QQ). His stack was fairly short (only $64 behind). I raised enough to put him all in and was fairly surprised to see the button call. As expected, the house player called. When the flop came down Qxx with two clubs, I knew I had no chance of winning the main pot. The house player certainly had either outflopped me or was ahead the entire time. I pushed in my stack and got the button to call with his AJ of clubs. He missed, which was good, because his missed draw almost made up for the money I lost to the house player. Oh, I didn’t mention? The house player, indeed, held pocket aces to my pocket kings.
—-
Twirly, obviously, is not a house player. Nor had I seen any evidence of anything nefarious going on. What’s more, I’m not laying down pocket kings. I re-raised and the big white-haired guy in the one-seat called. The guy had been doing a lot of calling, then pushing after hitting top pair all night. Twirly then announced he was re-raising all-in. He’d been chatting with Dominoes while I was playing with my chips and I already knew Twirly held aces. I mean, I didn’t KNOW, but I basically knew.
That’s when I made a mistake. I don’t think I was letting my read get to my hands, because the next thing I knew, I was doing what I would do if I thought Twirly held queens (still a possible holding, obviously). I was pushing all in (about two buy-ins) to isolate myself with him.
Long story short, my little “plan” worked. The big guy folded and Twirly showed me his aces.
“Surprise,” I muttered.
The board opened up a lot of outs for me, but none of them came. I was back where I started the night.
I looked at G-Rob and said, “Statistics are funny.”
He understood.
Then Dominoes said something that made me laugh and it was all better.
“Statistics, funny? Well, nine out of ten times they are.”
That’s gold, bitches.
——
As the midnight hour passed, Rob began making his move to leave. We’d only played two pots together all night. The first one, I called with top pair weak, kicker to his second pair. The second one, he made a flush at the same time I made aces up (with a better second pair than was on the board). I paid him off on that one. I think he came out a few bucks ahead of me on the two hands. No big surprise there. He’s always betting. I’m always calling.
As Rob cashed out, something occured to me.
He is killing the local poker economy.
You know the kind of heater he has been on recently. Add to that, last night he cashed out for more than five buy-ins. Again.
This kind of carnage may not be sustainable. If Rob (or anybody) continues to rape the tables like this on a consistent basis, the fish beds are going to dry up. There will be no more honey in that honey hole.
