My return to the live grind was, unfortunately, a flourishing success. The best thing that could have happened was for me to sit down, immediately lose a huge pot in a massive cooler and then be completely card dead for the rest of the night; then if I still #lovethegame then!
I rolled into Gala for old time's sake, with rbc_mike as it was pretty much his farewell to live poker in Nottingham. It didn't take long for me to start running like Goulder in all fairness. I folded for a few orbits, then noticed where they used to keep the giant float in front of the dealer, was a small box labelled "quads bonus." It's a really basic scheme where they take 50p out of every £25+ pot and at the end of the night split the entire pot over the 13 different quads available, and when someone lands that particular quads they drop all the cash in there and it resets to zero. So I had a quick look: tens and sevens were the ones to go for it seemed! So I made like the recreational players it was aimed at and called a raise from the big blind with
and flopped two pair on
. Yum yum. Lead out for the full pot and got raised. Call please. Check-jammed the turn when I filled up with the
and he screwed up his face and called it off. Presuming he's drawing almost dead I turn my cards over to calmly and collectively rake in a £300 pot when the
binks on the river. Good game composure. WEEEEE QUADS BONUS.
It's a little worrying that I'm either making quads or knocking it in these days, but I guess I'll deal with that when I'm not making quads...
There were a few more fun pots to speak of. One where I checkraised flop and barreled turn with A4 on A 4 2 9, then jammed the 5 river and villain tanks for a good two or three minutes before hero folding KK. Unsure how I managed to get two chunky streets there. I miss Gala.
Pretty sick pot where I couldn't quite get there versus chinese Jo, who has apparently made the transformation from giant nit to absolute LAGtard, I open the hijack behind a few limpers to £6 with
, the cutoff calls and he makes it £13 from the button. One of the limpers carries on calling off a bunch of bets, I call knowing that the cutoff is going to sigh peel and off we go to a
board. I donk lead to prevent any non top-pair type hands checking behind, and he just jams. I'm pretty happy to call it off, but he holds with
.
Now, the
hand that
I posted in the PHA... Online I think it's a clear bet-fold. Maybe live it's a bet-call just because by the time we're getting 20-1, that just about covers the time he's going to randomly chuck it in because "fuck it, I've got Ax/AT and I cba to keep £30 behind/good luck to him." My actual river line is clearly a one-off (maybe, perhaps I'm just this much of a sicko these days
). Something I like to do before I make a value-bet and after I've run the ranges through my head is just have a quick look at villain. This doesn't ever work versus more experienced players, someone like Mitch for example, who just has the nuts so frequently that it's no longer an exciting, pulse-racing experience. Against the recreational players, you can sometimes pick something up: a small amount of disinterest, changes in their chip handling, them calling their wife over shouting "love, I've got a running flush, take a picture!" In this instance, I did pick something up. I won't say here what it is, because it's the same tell I pick up on PeeJay. Ended up check-folding after he jammed, and he showed me tens full. BOOM. Not even being results-orientated, this was like a one time fold because I finally started trusting myself so James Keys doesn't yell at me again.
Loving the game. Good game dejection. More poker tonight, probably at Dusk. Watch this space. Peace.
Author