Play and Results from Saturday Night

The results at the end, but first the most exciting hand of the night.

All the players folded to Mark and Tim pre-flop. Mark was the short stack. Tim made a medium bet, Mark thought about calling Tim's bet and said "I'm all-in". Then Tim feigned concern for a couple of moments messing with his chips and said "Mark, I gotta call your all- in".

In our games it rarely happens that only two players are left to see the flop. Most of the players think their hand has a chance and usually call the pre-flop bets and raises. It is also very rare for one player to announce all-in and have the other player call, pre-flop. So what was interesting to the rest of the table was that we were going to see head-to-head action with both players turning up their cards. (Since Mark had called all-in and their were no other players in this hand, there would be no more betting).

So, it got our attention. Tim turned over his two cards first, pocket queens, or as Mark likes to say "hello ladies", then Mark turns over pocket kings! At this point, you realize that if nothing crazy comes up on the board, Mark's pocket kings have Tim's pocket queens dominated. (Meaning that a pair of kings beats a pair of queens).

The players watching let out an "Oh" when we saw the two very close pocket pairs. Then the dealer dealt the first three cards of the community pile (called the flop). Low and behold it was a king, a queen, and a low card. Then everyone let out a "wow" meaning that you don't normally expect a pocket pair to get a third matching card (called trips) on the flop. When we saw first the king come out, we thought it was all over for Tim. Then the second card comes out a queen and it was pretty long odds that this flop would happen like this.

In the end the last two community cards dealt, (the turn, and the river) turned out to be lower number cards which had no meaning to the hand. Mark won, Tim extended his hand across and table and said "Good hand".

When you play hand over hand of sometimes boring cards, it was fun to watch one like this.

In the end, the big winner was Tim, who started with his original buy-in and played all night. Most of the night, Kenny had a commanding lead and still ended up with a win, but gave a lot of chips back to Keith and Tim towards the end. I played with my original buy-in most of the night, just didn't get many good hands, bought in for $10 more, and finally lost that as well. It was a fun evening but fun just ain't cuttin' it without winning!

My strategy of sometimes playing tight/aggressive and sometimes loose/weak betting did not show the results that I had hoped. Here's hoping for better luck next week.