Monday, October 30, 2006
The Problem with Low Buy-in Poker Tourneys
Thursday, October 26, 2006
El RushBo Imitates Fox
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Home Game Stories
Six-handed the other night, and arguably about the six best players in
our group were there. At the very least there were no fish.
I have this super-tight image, so this first situation is classic.
I'm in the big blind and I get A-A. Blinds are something like 100/200
- everyone had 2500 in starting chips plus a 2500 rebuy so there are
30,000 chips in play at this time (nobody has busted). It folds all
around to the small blind, who ALSO folds. I get A-A and NOBODY calls
the blind. Unreal.
The next time in the big blind, I get AsJs and the SAME Thing happens.
I turned both of these over and the room roared. Whatcha gonna do?
Highlight of the night...in the small blind, I get 39o. Call the big
blind, he pops it to 2x and I stick around. Flop comes with three
rags. Turn is a 9. River is another rag. He bets every time and I
call every time. At the end, someone says to me "How could you just
call that?" and I respond "Because I believe I have the best hand." I
have the pair of 9s. He has a couple of over cards, A-high or
something like that. I read it *perfectly*. Didn't play it
perfectly, though. I should've popped it on the turn instead of
giving him another chance to catch. Still, your reads can win you
pots that your cards alone won't touch. Very rewarding to start
taking these kinds of pots.
Highlight of the night not involving me...our home game
player-of-the-year leader goes all-in early on and gets called by the
player to his left. Roughly 2500 chips at stake for each player,
though the re-buy was still out there. This was no more than six
hands into the evening. POY leader has 9-9 and is called by 7-7.
Holy crap! Those are complete throw-away hands until the blinds get
into the hundreds, aren't they?
Missed opportunity of the night... I got 3c6c in early position and
something was telling me to play it. But you can't play that hand,
right? Well I laid it down. I would've had a set of 3s on the flop
and quads on the river. Could've done some damage with that. It's
still the right play to lay it down, though.
The end came suddenly. Blinds were 800/1600 and about to go up on the
very next hand. I get A-10o on the button, three-handed (so I'm first
to act too). I go all-in (1600 call + 4700 chips) and big stack to my
right calls with Jh5h. Flop 5-5-6 and that was that. Tourney ended
on the very next hand. Again, whatcha gonna do? With nobody busting
out early, and the blinds doubling to extreme amounts later on, this
quickly morphed into bingo by the 7th level.
Still, third place in this field is pretty good. Felt like I played
well, made some good reads, and turned up the heat when the time was
right.
Willie Post-Mortem Comments
"Sometimes you get caught up in the moment. I wasn't thinking home run there. I was just thinking that he'd hit the ball in the gap somewhere and [Endy Chavez] could score from first [to tie the score]."
But why had Randolph used Floyd rather than have another player bunt?
"We had bases loaded for Carlos Beltran. Same scenario, right?" he said. "Just make believe I bunted. It would have been the same thing, right?
Uh, not the same scenario, Willie. Beltran was up with two outs. The pinch-hitter (Floyd) came up with none out. Clearly you understand the difference, right?
"I don't second-guess all that stuff, man. If you subscribe to that, then we would have had the same situation. If you believe we would have bunted and Jose Reyes would have hit that ball to center field. If you look at it that way and that's the way most people look at it. It would have been two outs, [Paul] Lo Duca would have walked. Same scenario is set up.
"That's the way I look at it because no one knows. I don't believe in that situation in giving up an out. One run down? A tie game? Yeah, I probably do [bunt] then. But not with two runs down and you've got momentum going. I didn't send Cliff to hit a three-run homer.
I was hoping he'd drive the ball into the gap. He's an excellent doubles hitter, one of the few guys on my team who doesn't hit into double plays. He's a fly ball guy. I'm not thinking he's going to hit a grandiose home run. He's going to drive the ball. We're going to keep the momentum going. We're going to score a couple of runs.
"You can look back -- and I don't -- and think about what you could have done, should have done. But the bottom line is that thing played out the way we wanted it to. And maybe even better because we had our best hitter, a Cardinal killer, at the plate; with one hit we're going to the World Series.
"Wouldn't change a thing. Second-guess whether I would have bunted or not. Who knows?
I might have put Anderson Hernandez up there and in front of 50,000 people, the 20-year-old kid could have [not gotten it done]. He might have popped that ball off ... or tried to bunt against a guy with a hellacious curveball and a 95 mph fastball and gotten to a point where he had to swing with two strikes on him and he hit into a double play or whatever. ... Say Glavine gets a bunt down. There's no guarantee. It's not always easy to lay a bunt down, especially when all the money's on the table like that. ... I thought about it. I thought about it way before it came up. But I still felt like with two runs to come across I needed to keep our momentum going.
"It would have been [an] easy call for [a] bunt. Outside of that, I didn't want to give up an out in that situation. In hindsight, it turned out even better, perfectly, for us. Best hitter. This guy killed the Cardinals all series. He threw a nasty curveball and Beltran got locked up. I'd like him to have taken a swing there.
But the guy has a great curveball. He made a great pitch. I know that's part of it, people want to second guess that. But I feel real good about the decisions I made."
Friday, October 20, 2006
Mets Post-Mortem
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Why I Hate the Cardinals
- That little rodent playing SS
- Ozzie Smith
- Willie McGee. FUgly to this day.
- Whitey Herzog
- Tony LaRussa, his overmanaging, the suicide squeeze, and all his crap
- The pitching coach's kid who manages to hit a HR
- Spiezio's stupid red goatee/soul patch
- Tommy Herr and his curly mullet
- Darrell Porter
- The 25,000 idiot fans who sport a cardboard one at the games
- The other 15,000 idiot fans who sit on their asses until something good happens.
- All 40,000 of them who wear red, willingly drink Budweiser, and worship the rodent SS.
- John Tudor
- Busch Stadium. The new one seems nice. Awful quiet though. But the old one was just such a disaster.
- These too-dumb-to-know-any-better juveniles coming out of the bullpen
- Braden Looper
- Vince Coleman. Damn the Mets for ever thinking that would work.
- The fat 2B with the dreadlocks. Still faster than Shawn Green, though.
- Pooholes. Forget about the Glavine comments, this guy is a machine. You can't not like him.
Maine needs to contribute 4-5 solid innings. 3 runs or less. Carpenter needs to be smacked around early and often. The bullpen needs to shore up a win and help move on to Game 7.