The Home Game - Part 2

So this past weekend was Poker night again, and attendance was once again a little thinner than hoped. 5 players came out to play, no rebuys this time. 10$ freeze out. Small stakes, yeah, but most of my friends are poor college-going folk, so it's still worth competing for.

The first game was the more intense of the two. I use the pokerstars blind structure (minus antes, by popular demand) and 20 minute levels. The very first hand of the tourney, I'm UTG and find none-other than red aces. I triple the bet to 60, and it folds around. Boooo. I show, for fun. I don't think it's -EV to show a hand like that when it's the first hand of the tourney. Some small pots later (none of which I won) I wake up with QQ OTB. One player limps, I raise it up again, the BB calls, and the limper folds. The first two cards on the flop were nice little rags, but the 3rd card in the window was a King :( BB checks to me, I bet about 2/3 the pot, and he min-raises.

This is the first time he's been to the game. He's folded every hand so far, which I know isn't saying a lot since we're only 4 hands into this thing, but for some reason I was getting a strong-ish vibe off of him. So I pondered for a while and folded.

I didn't feel great about the hand at the time, but he made this play 4 or 5 more times throughout the course of the evening, and every time he had TP. Usually a shit kicker though. So I'm pretty sure he had a K there.

As usual, the rest of the field wasn't spectacular. One especially generous player went out early after continuously calling raises preflop, and big bets on all 3 streets with either ace high or a mediocre pair. Some folk just don't like money.

I ended up heads up with the same guy as the last game. I don't remember too much about the hands leading up to the final hand. A lot of stealing and restealing and we only saw two flops before we got to this hand.

Hero (~3400): OTB/SB with AsTs
Villain: (~4100): BB

Blinds 200/400

Hero raises to 1200. Villain calls.

Flop: K-Q-rag with 1 spade.

Hero checks, villain shoves, hero calls.


I wasn't crazy about calling, but I figured I had two live cards, and from how much he'd been shoving, I included some air in his range. I figured it was enough to call getting pretty big pot odds. He shows me K5, I don't improve, and I have to settle with 2nd. Oh well.


The next game was considerably faster. The winner from the first round had to jet off, and we agreed to make the blinds go up every 15 minutes. I don't remember too much until myself and the player who min-raised my QQ in the first tourney were heads up. The final hand saw me with AQ raise preflop. He calls. The flop comes three rag spades and I have less than a pot behind, so I shove, and he calls with KQ, the King in spades. The turn is a 4th rag spade, and that's all she wrote.

So I had a massive 0% ROI this time around (2nd place got their buyin back both games) but it was still a great deal of fun, and I'm really looking forward to the next one which will be Jan 25th. Hopefully we can fill the table this time.