Wired All Day Long

Today, I had a nice hand and a half in the poker-by-email WRGPT tournament, AKA Glacial Poker Tourney. Hand and a half, you ask? How’s that possible? Read on…

The first full hand was a pair of wired jacks I was dealt in middle position. Blinds were 100/200, and a new, big-stack player at our table opened for a T600 raise UTG. I smoothed with my fish hooks (and relatively small stack of T8000). My cold call brought in two other players,who also called. Flop was a ragged board, ten-high. The UTG player raised to T1200, which in hindsight wasn’t actually a very big raise (a little less than half the pot), but it felt bigger at the time, especially because I had misread the email on the hand and thought it was a raise of T1800. In any case, I was in a quandary as to what to do: fold, call, or raise. And if I raised, how much?

I talked the hand over with both Bret and the Guru. After a lot of thought, I decided a) I should have reraised preflop, to both isolate and find out where I was in the hand; and b) I should now call the flop raise and hope for a good card on the turn. The basic thinking was that I would still have a reasonably sized M, and that I could make a move if the turn brought a decent card. If the turn was scary, on the other hand, or if either of the two guys downstream of me made a move, I could fold.

Well, the turn did bring a blank, and when it was checked to me, I figured the UTG player had missed with a big ace on the flop, and was merely c-betting with the T1200 stab. I took some time to work through the numbers (see PokerStove, below), and in the end decided to push with my jacks. Low and behold, I got the folds I was looking for, and added ~50% to my stack in doing so. I’m still a shorty at the table with T12,000, but it sure feels better than the T8000 I had earlier in the day.

The “half” a hand I had today was (is) a pair of wired aces that were dealt to me immediately after the jacks. Why is it only half a hand? Answer: because it’s been over eight hours and the action still hasn’t gotten to me yet; i.e., we haven’t even gone around the table once preflop. Oooh-la-la, is it nice to have those wired rockets in the bank and not even have to think about playing them yet. Eight hours, plus, of knowing I have a killer starting hand and I get to just relish the feeling.

Matt Matros wrote in his Making Of A Poker Player book that one of the best parts of playing in the WRGPT tournament is when you get dealt aces. Not only do you get the thrill of seeing the bullets show up in your hand, but you get to keep those aces All Day Long before acting on them. And you know what? He’s right. The feeling is really great; I highly recommend it to others playing this tournament :-). Sure, I’ll probably bust out of the tournament with the aces (call me a short-term optimist, but a long-term pessimist), but for now it’s a pretty damn good feeling to have rockets waiting in the hole.

The other interesting poker news to report from today is that I downloaded PokerStove, which is a cool, free little program used to evaluate hands and ranges of hands against each other. I ran my aforementioned JJ against a range of typical UTG hands, for instance, and pretty much convinced myself that I had a reasonable edge over my opponent, given the flop. When the turn came a blank, running PokerStove further convinced me that I was probably pretty far ahead. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but seeing the percentages in my favor really did help me mathematically justify the push on fourth street. Or maybe I just got lucky?

Or would that be half-lucky?

All-in for now…
-Bug