Beating the Home Game - Part 2

So I finally broke in the new poker table last night. It was a smaller turn out than I had hoped, and the prize pools were pretty low. Still lots of fun though. There was myself, a former coworker, and two guys from school and one of their friends (who got significantly intoxicated over the course of the evening thanks to a 2-4 of Cap'n Morgans.

We had a warm up game waiting for one guy to show up, and that ended relatively quickly when I got it in with A2 against Q4 and the board ran Q7228. There weren't many huge pots. Almost everyone had a style that was hugely chip-bleeding, and just by playing top pair fairly hard, I got paid off huge. We ended up heads up with me having a 5-1 chip lead or something to that effect.

The second game was much more intense. The prize pool was only 70$, but it was enough for us starving students to put up a good fight for. I got on the ropes twice, running flopped trips into a flush and the same trips with a better kicker. The flush holder and my other school friend were sitting on almost all the chips in play. I rebought and managed to pick a few spots to win big pots .. AT helped me out on a T-high flop where I had massive bets called on the flop and turn and finally folded him on the river.

At one point I actually had a slight chip lead, only to run AJ and AQ all in preflop. That put me brutally short. Fortunately, one of my friends was keeping up his horribly bleeding ways and he bled a lot of chips in my direction. Finally I had him slightly covered and he went all in with K8 and I called with KJ and held. I actually went over the top with my other friend (the monster stack) still to act. He thought for a while and folded A4 face up. He would have won it right there.

Heads up lasted fairly long. I got pretty aggressive and did a lot of shoving over the top of his raises.

The key hand was me holding Ah7h and the flop came something like 6h 5h 3c. My friend lead out with a pretty big bet and I shoved. He called almost instantly and showed 54. The turn bricked, but the river brought the beautiful 3rd heart and I was chip leader.

It ended about 10 hands later when I shoved A7 and he called with QT.

The next game will probably be in a couple of weeks. And if I want people to keep coming, I'm going to have to teach myself the way of losing. Still lots of fun!

That's all for now.