MATH sucks (out)

I'm torn between wanting to whine about the bad beat that sent me to the rails in last night's MATH and wanting to rise above it and just take it in stride. I see no middle ground between the two. Eh, we'll see how I feel when I get to that point in the story.

I got a nice bump early when my very speculative play of 45s came in with a well hidden straight on the turn and DDionysus couldn't get away from his top two pair. Still in level one and I was up 1000. Nice.

Sadly, I hovered at roughly that same spot for a very long time. Then I made a move in the wrong direction and hovered in that same spot for a long time too.

Apparently people have been getting more serious about the whole BBT thing. Even in deep stack events like the MATH, you frequently see a good portion of the field eliminated by the first break. Such was not the case last night.

Somewhere along in here while I was moving sideways, smokkee moved to our table and dropped about half his already too small stack. But he doubled when his KQs bested NewinNov's AQs when the flop brought a K. A short while later he doubled again when his AK filled to a full house against cemfredmd's QQ.

After a very long period of nothing worth reporting, I caught AA and managed to turn a small profit. This moved me far enough up that all I needed to do was survive to make the points. I'd been in serious danger of not doing so before this.

Finally, the points bubble burst and there were several quick eliminations.

Well, now we're to the bad beat. I guess it hurt more than usual because I set a trap, I got somebody to willingly walk into it, and they rivered their 6-outer to send me home rather than moving well into the top ten. Sometimes poker sucks. I guess I'll just leave it at that.

I finished something like 25th, which apparently gave me enough points to move up to 57th on the BBT leaderboard. Top 50 is my current goal. I missed too many events during my hiatus to have any reasonable hope of a much higher finish. I'll settle for making the freeroll at the end of the season. And if 13% shots stop sending me to the rails, I just might make it.

Earlier in the evening I played another of the Tier One tourneys trying to replace the ticket I used to play the MATH. This was THE tightest of these events I have ever played. Usually there are three or four eliminations in the first couple levels. A small hand full of chips had barely passed from one stack to another by that time in this one.

I was doing okay, having stolen a number of pots, when I get AQ in the BB. Somebody on the other side of the table raises it to 2BB. The alarm bells went off but I didn't listen. With some players this is an almost sure sign of AA. With others it's a sign of weakness. It's hard to know which until you've seen them do it and observed the results.

Instead of doing the smart thing and carefully observing the coiled snake in the middle of the trail, I decided to poke it with a stick. I re-raise to three times his bet. This was dumb from at least two perspectives. Aside from the AA alarms, if he called it left him pretty much pot committed and me forced to call his all-in due to the pot odds. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

He pushes. Getting 3-to-1 from the pot, I'm forced to call. Of course, he's got the rockets and the board doesn't fill the straight it gave me a shot at on the flop.

Later, down to about M=5, I push with some crap cards, hoping everybody will lay down and I'll buy another round to catch something decent. The same guy calls me and turns over, you guessed it, pocket rockets. What are the odds of getting into big hands twice with the same guy and both times he's got a monster like that? Sometimes poker sucks.