Punishing kings

Warning: This blog entry is a thinly veiled bad beat
story masquerading as a tournament report

I still hate Luton and Luton hates me. I think it must be because I've never owned that many hats. Well if that's what you can call a place to put a G-Casino and hold poker tournaments, you can keep it. I'm not going back there again, not until the next time anyway.

These freakin' tournaments I tell you what, they exist only to test and punish me. I'm the pokering King Sisyphus. I build my stack up and then just one horrendous collision with the fate or the Gods, whatever you want to call it and it's right back down to where I started, or just busto altogether and it's back the next month to exercise my masochism once again and endure more punishment.

Now I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I played very well this day. I have not dominated a table like that for ages. I was so in the zone I became the zone. I half expected to find myself in a pot with Keanu Reeves or that Morpheus fella, I was soooo matrixing the table.

I was raising everything left right and on many occasions, centre too. The internet kids would have been proud of me as I c-bet 3 bet, 4 bet and even 5 bet my way with trash to a stack of 20,000 in the first two levels. Woooooo, I had never felt so alive.

Now why play this way? It's so when you do get a premium holding, your table mates are so pissed off with your bullying nonsense that they end up playing back at your with pocket guff and end up giving your their entire stack in a nice little box wrapped up in shiny paper with a red silk bow.

And so it came to pass, it was poker Christmas re-visited (see WSOP-E post last September). With blinds at 75-150 it's folded around to the whipper-snapper to my right in the cut-off who raises to 400. I'm on the button with pocket kings and I re-raise to 1,500 (I can't bring myself to say 3-bet again, I'm too old) as I had done many many times already.

Dude in the Big-Blind is not happy, some steam discharges from his ears. I've had his monies away on many occasions and he's having no more of it. He re-pops to 3,000. Original whipper-snapper raiser folds immediately and I declare that I am indeed all-in.

"Do you just never fold?" says frustrated big blind man.....who then let's out a sigh and shoves his remaining 9,000 in the middle. I turn over my kings and he shows pocket jacks. At this point I agree with Paulie two thumbs, I should just be allowed to scoop the pot there and then as I have clearly manouevered his boat up shit creek and stolen his paddle. He acknowledges this with a tap of the table and is already fixing to leave.

Only no...because the Gods hate kings and have cast me in the role of Sisyphus and so big-blind man will make some sort of funky straight on the river and I will be right back down to 4k and the wind well and truly taken out of my sails.

This 4k soon becomes no-k and I sit myself down in front of the tellies by the bar and watch West Ham lose while I begin to nod off and have a mucky dream about a blonde haired strumpet sporting nothing amidships except two whole bowls of angel delight and me without a spoon.

Well I tell you what I've had it now with big pairs. The only big pairs I want under my hands from now on are the traditional kind attached to strumpets. They're the only ones that are fun.

Me yesterday