The Lucky Donut

I have a confession to make.  I experimented with straddling last night.  But it was just one time, and I didn’t inhale, so that’s OK, isn’t it?

I wanted to do something to help my solid-as-a-rock image.  I’d hardly played a hand for an hour, then when I did, I got my entire stack in the middle with nothing less than a flopped nut straight.  I was amazed I got any action even then, but it was only going to get trickier to get a call from anyone who had been playing the slightest attention.

Not only that, the player to my left had remembered me, knew that I didn’t fool around and – like most of the players at Gutshot – couldn’t keep information to himself.  When I first sat down, the dealer asked for blinds and said to me "it’s £2 if you want to straddle".  I declined, saying "not this time".  He piped up, laughing, "yeah, and not any time".  So when I actually did stick my two quid in blind, I got a reaction from him as close to a hi-5 as you could ever expect from a young black Londoner wearing a Full Tilt hoodie and an ipod.

With six players calling the straddle, I didn’t have the balls to do anything other than check my option when I see an offsuit ten-five.  Not a great hand to play ever, let alone multi-way and out of position.

When the flop gave me a dreadfully weak top pair though, could I just check-fold?  I probably should – the board was T72, all different suits – but I found myself needing to be seen to throw some chips around, and led out for £10.  One player re-raised the minimum and another called, so it’s £10 back to me for a pot of £64.  Now, finally, I change my mind, panic at the prospect of losing all my newly acquired profit with a garbage hand and give up.

In fact I would have been up against T8 and 75, with the 5 on the turn giving me the best hand and another player a decent second best hand, so I could have done very well out of my moment of madness.  But that’s just some stray results-oriented thinking getting the better of me.  It would be a very poor call if I could actually see the other players’ hands, and a pretty poor call if I thought I might have as many as five outs.

If I do find a call here, I’m not going to put in another chip unless my hand improves, but I’m still not sure what to do if I do hit a miracle.  If I’m counting getting implied odds with a suckout, I have to know where they’re coming from.  Another ten on board would definitely get me into trouble against someone who flopped top pair, or a flopped set.  Improving to two pair gives me not much more than a difficult decision still to make.

I see the potential for only big losses in my future so I fold the hand.  So much for making myself appear looser.  Now I’m the rock who folds top pair to a minimum reraise, getting better than 6-1 on the call.  But looking at the kind of action I was getting in this hand anyway, I guess I can live with it…

Maybe I can’t actually lose in the Gutshot £25-£50 game.  Five evenings, five winning sessions and nearly £300 up.  I have to be running good, the question is just how good?  I really need a losing session to keep a grip on reality.  I left (relatively) early this evening as I was getting tired (but apparently not too tired to brag in a blog entry) and left with £83 of other people’s money in my wallet. 

It all started off so promising when I couldn’t hit a straight draw in a pot that was just too big to let go.  Along with eight (count ’em) others, I’d called a £3 raise from the small blind holding T8 in spades, and the flop brought J93 with two diamonds.  Sixth to act moves all in for his remaining £28 and the player to my right throws his last £14 into the pot.  It’s £28 to call, to win £74, which I can’t pass up.  I could be drawing to only 6 outs for some or all of the pot, and there’s a chance it could be raised behind me, making me play my remaining £40 for not such a great price.  But there could also me more callers, and if I can beat one of them I can beat them all.

Then things got good just after the tournament started.  Our table had been reduced to three-handed, and after a few £5 pots I somehow managed to win another player’s stack with an ace high flush against a smaller flush.  If that happened online with just three players dealt in, you’d say it was fixed.

After I got moved to the dealer-dealt table, the only way I managed to increase my stack for about an hour was by adding the change from my burger to it.  Tipping waitresses with chips is one thing, but letting them give you chips as change for your twenty feels a little bit funny.  Those chips should never have been in play, but nobody seems to care when you bring more chips onto the table, only when you put them in your pocket.  What can you do?

My big hand came well after the burger was just another juicy memory.  I called a pre-flop raise from the huge stack to my right who had been raising every time he played a hand.  KQs was more than good enough to see a flop with, and I was very happy to see five other players join in – had to double check I wasn’t actually in Vegas!  I flopped the nut straight – ace, jack, ten – and let out a little cheer internally.  With two hearts on board and seven players left in, I wanted to find someone who also didn’t like the possible flush draw to get it all in against right now.  I bet £20 into the £35 pot, and only got one call from the pre-flop raiser.  It didn’t really tell me much, but at least I’d ended up with position.

I willed for a black card, and the turn obliged.  Be careful what you wish for though: it was a king, so I still had the nuts, but you’d expect it to kill my action.  How on earth did I actually get a payoff from a worse hand with AKJT on board?  My customer went into the tank for a good nwhile and eventally called my last £50, saying "I don’t believe you".  He turned over king-ten and didn’t improve on the river.  That king had actually helped me, although I’m still not sure how he could call with a very weak two pair on that board (he didn’t believe I had better than ace-nine?) and I was stacking up over £170 as the bully stood up to leave.  He still had about £200 to take home, but he was clearly wounded.

The guy in seat ten has just £17 left in front of him in the £25-£50 buy in pot limit game at Gutshot when it’s time to pay the £3 hourly donation.  Everyone throws in their chips except him.  "Let me just see if I can win a hand", he says, "and then I’ll pay you".  The dealer shrugs whatever – after all the contributions are voluntary, and he’s only working for tips.  It’s just bad karma to mess with the system.

I don’t remember whether he sat down with the full £50 but he hadn’t reloaded, and I’d be surprised if anyone wasn’t aware that he’d not picked up a hand all evening.  That’s clearly a good enough reason to have a bit of a gamble with the club’s money before deciding whether to donate.  The times he gets lucky, he pays his dues afterwards but keeps the extra profit he won from having that £3 in his stack.  The times he loses, the donation simply gets pushed across the table to another player, who surely won’t think to – or see why they should – pay it for him now.

And so it happens.  Mr Cheap manages to get it all in pre-flop with pocket nines and is called by five other players.  Two others make it to showdown with him, both with undercards to his pair, and 99 ends up the third best hand.  Should his hand – by far the best pre-flop – hold up here, he would be £15 better off than he should be thanks to gambling with his risk-free loan.  Funny how these things work themselves out.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems like they don’t want your money.  Tonight I played for four hours and only coughed up the hourly fee once.  The first time they came to collect – after a new table had been running for 90 minutes – most of the players stood up and went to another table or upstairs to the tournament.  We played a few hands three handed before tournament bustees started to join us (it’s freeroll Monday, so this didn’t take long) but they didn’t come back for a donation for another hour and a half, and after that the next time anyone thought to try and collect some actual revenue from the poker tables, I’d already started to leave.

The player to my right, Chen – a young chinese man who I struggled to understand at times, but due just as much to my cloth ears as to the slight accent adorning his perfect English – asked me how the club could make money.  This was after we’d played for over two hours without contributing a penny, so I explained what should happen.  I’d already told him that soft drinks were free, but tonight they weren’t, so at every available opportunity he’d been turning to me and muttering "one pound fifty!" with a cheeky grin.  Hey, tonight you pay for your drinks but the table time is cheap.

I expect that Chen, along with almost everyone else there, probably did not understand the reason for the new sign on the door: "Operated by Clerkenwell Clubs Ltd".  The former company is – and there’s really no better word to use than this – busto.  The question should be not how they make money, but do they actually make money?

Usually the internet room would bring in some revenue, whether it’s from renting out workstations by the hour or offering them free to play Gutshot’s own online poker.  But right now, it’s all offline because the ADSL is disconnected.  I couldn’t possibly believe that this is because they didn’t pay the bill, when there’s a perfectly good alternative explanation: the change of ownership must have confused their ISP enough to result in a full week of downtime.

Anyway, I’m now four for four (which I just discovered should never be written in words) winning sessions in the £25/£50 game.  I’m due a loss for sure, and tonight should have been one.  I got lucky at the right time to finish up £56 instead of… looks like it would have been £12 down.

Holding a pair of tens, I raised the pot from the big blind after 5 people limped and I got 3 callers. The flop was jack-high with 2 small cards.  I checked as did two others and the last player to act bet £10 into the £26 pot.  He only had another £11 left so I made a minimum raise – thinking this would either get me to a fairly cheap showdown against the short stack or tell me for sure that I’m beaten by one of the other players.  It’s not a great play – I’m still making limit hold’em moves that don’t belong in pot limit games and tournament moves that don’t belong in cash games – but it did what I wanted, even if what I wanted to do was not a terribly good idea.

In effect I was taking just better than 2-1 pot odds on the chance that he holds a worse hand than mine – possibly a smaller pocket pair, or that he’s betting overcards in position as a semi-bluff.  In retrospect, as he would have been pot-committed to any raise he almost certainly had to have at least a jack here.   And he did, but I somehow spiked a ten on the river to ourdraw his top pair, top kicker.  Nice hand me.