I'm Not a Bad Enough Player to Beat This Game

Car saga is finally over!  You mean I have to get back to talking about poker again?  Let's see if I can still do this.

This is a recent session out in Ventura.  Remember the game is 1/2 with a $50-$100 buy-in.  I always buy-in for the max of course. 

This game was an action table, a lot more so than the 1/2 usually is here.  And there were plenty of big stacks.  I saw a few of those big stacks get made, but a lot of them were there when I arrived.

I had dropped close to $60 without winning a pot.  I topped off my stack to get right back around $100.  I guess I had close to that when this hand happened.  I called $5 with pocket 5's.  As I've mentioned before, a raise to $4 or $5 is pretty common in this game.  Then a guy made it $15.  He was a fairly active player and rather aggro.  Then the guy who initially made it $5, an older gentleman with a big stack, made it $45. Well, of course I'm not gonna call off half my stack with just a lousy pair of fives preflop.  So I folded.  The guy who made it $15 called.

The flop was Jack-5-3.  Damn.  That sure was annoying.  I don't remember the exact action but they got it all-in on that flop.  The aggro had a stack similar to mine, maybe a little bigger, and the older guy had him easily covered.  The aggro flipped over his hand.  It was pocket Jacks. 

Suddenly I felt a whole better.  I had just dodged a bullet, right?  Set-over-set is pretty awful when you're on the wrong side of it, as I would have been.  I was silently thanking the guy who made it $45 for saving my stack.

But then the dealer put out the turn card.  It was the case 5.  I had basically thrown away quads.  I throw up in my mouth a little.  The river was meaningless and the older guy did show his hand, Ace-King suited.  He had a flush draw on the flop.  I don't recall if he hit his flush because he was drawing dead to a boat on the turn.  Of course, all I could think about was, he should have been drawing dead to my quad 5's.

Ugh.  That would have been the first time I'd made a hand too.  For a second I thought that we had missed out on the bad beat jackpot.  But no, I reminded myself that Jack's full losing to quad 5's wouldn't have qualified.  The minimum losing hand is Ace's full of Jacks.  So at least there was that.

My stack was dwindling and then I got pocket 3's. A new guy to the table made it $23.  He had less than $80 to start.  So it certainly was not worth calling.  Somebody else did.  Of course there was a 3 on the flop.  Jeez.  I don't remember the details but I would have won that pot and it would have been more nearly a triple up for me (based on the fact that it was all-in again and neither player could have beaten a set).

I actually managed to win a couple of hands, both when I had Ace-10 and a 10 hit the board.  So I built my stack up to over $120.

Then I got pocket 6's.  I was in middle position and no one had bet.  I knew if I just limped, it was possible nobody else would come in and we'd end up chopping the blinds.  Yeah, it's weird if you're used to Vegas rules, but if only one player has entered a pot, and it was only a limp, that player and the blinds can agree to chop and everyone takes their money back.  I guess that's because in this game, if it is just three-way to flop, and both blinds are in, the entire pot goes to rake and the jackpot drop.  So why bother?

Therefore, I made it $4.  Sometimes that actually gets you the blinds, but if someone calls at least they'll be a few bucks in the pot to play for. A player called.  Remember the guy with the set of Jacks before?  Well as I said, he was aggro and he had managed to piss away most of the chips he'd won.  This time, he raised to $49.  It was an odd bet to say the least.  He had a few more chips behind him, looked like $8 or $9.  A different older guy, who had been hit with the deck like you wouldn't believe, called the $49. He had tons of chips. It folded back to me.  Sure I remembered the pocket 5's that turned into quads and the pocket 3's that flopped a set.  But, there was just no way it made any sense at all to call a $49 bet with pocket 6's.  So I folded.

The caller hadn't realized that the first guy hadn't shoved.  But then he saw those 8 or 9 chips and said something, "Why did you leave those behind?"  And the dealer said, "That's to bluff with."  I thought that was really funny.  Although you could argue that the dealer shouldn't be making comments (suggestions?) like that.  I think because it was such a small amount, it was ok.

Do I have to tell you that there was a 6 on the flop?  The aggro put his remaining 8 or 9 chips in the pot and the other player called (the dealer actually almost jumped the gun on the turn card, because he just assumed the guy wasn't folding—no matter what he had—for such a relatively small bet).

Here's the really sick part.  The guy with the $49 bet turned over Queen-4!  The guy who called had Ace-rag.  I guess his excuse was that this might have been the first flop in 20-minutes that hadn't hit him.  His call was perhaps a heat-check.  And his Ace-high would have won except the first idiot caught a 4 on the river.

So in other words, that set I would have hit if I'd have kept my cards wouldn't even have been necessary!  An unimproved pair of 6's would have been good enough to take down that three-way pot.

Regardless, that was the third set of the session I had missed out on.  What a day.

But I I know I played those hands right, didn't I?  I recall when I first starting reading about no-limit poker, they used to say that for small pocket pairs, you needed to have the potential to win 10-12 times the size of the bet you were calling preflop for calling to be the correct move.  But more recently, I've seen the books saying that it should be closer to 20-25x the bet.  That's because, I think, that players have gotten better and they are much less likely to stack off with top pair than they were in the good old days.

Regardless, I didn't have the potential to win 10x what I would have called in any of those hands, let alone 20-25x.

Now I'm far from a great poker player, but I'm just not bad enough to have called those raises.  So you see, I would have had to have been a much worse player than I am to have made money on this particular day.

I ended up with a $30 loss for the day.  But it's hard not to think about all that money that I would have made if only I had been bad enough to make those horrible calls.