With about ten minutes to go before the 6PM $500 satellite, I spot Rich (2p2’er Shorty55), whom I first met in Vegas last summer and who took half my action in the 2K I played at Foxwoods a few months ago. Then again, he’s not tough to spot, partially because he’s like eight feet tall, and partially because he’s neither an octogenarian nor a corpulent Italian and therefore sticks out like a sore thumb in the Foxwoods poker room.
We chat for a few minutes, and he tells me he was debating whether to come while playing 5/10 NL online. As he explains the decision-making process: “I flopped bottom set with 22, turn is an A, I’ thinking ‘Great, he’s got two pair, time to get the money in.’ Turns out he had AA for top set, but wait, deuce on the river! When something like that happens, you just have to go to Foxwoods to play tournaments. Poor guy, I saw him make quads under quads in the next half hour, too. Never seen that before.”
We take our seats, and my starting table turns out to be real soft. Early on, with blinds 25/50, UTG opens for 200, UTG+1 calls, and I re-raise to 1000 with QQ. UTG folds, UTG+1 calls, flop is a very nice J52r. This guy has passed up two opportunities to reraise me, so I’m not too worried about AA/KK/JJ, and I’ve seen him overvalue top pair already. Basically, I’m looking to bet the flop and call a check-raise for 8.5K. That’s exactly what happens, with him showing me JTo. Even though I got his chips, I still wish he could somehow rebuy and keep sitting to me right.
Oh well, as consolation I open to 300 (blinds now 50/100) with QQ next orbit, and BB reraises to 1000 pretty quick. Live donks tend to do stupid shit with Aces and sometimes with K’s, and the size of this raise felt more like TT/JJ/AK trying to end the action pre-flop. I call, and flop is 742. Well, no getting away now. He bets 2K, and I call. Turn is another blank, he bets 3K with 3.5K behind, I think, reassure myself that he doesn’t have to have AA here, and set him in. He’s got JJ, and I’m up to like 27K from my starting 10K in half an hour. Heart live poker.
After that, it’s mostly folding for me, because the play is too loose to make many moves. I snap off a short-stack shove with AKs on my BB, I think he had like AT or something I dominated.
With blinds 200/400/50, I pick up ATs on the button. The worst player at the table limps in, I make 2K, he already has 400 in the pot so obviously can’t fold for 1600 more. Flop A95hh. Not ideal, but this guy’s pretty bad. He checks, I bet 3K, he hems and haws forever and tells me he doesn’t know if he can call but I know he can and sure enough he does.
Turn was something harmless, he checks, and I check behind cuz I know he’ll let me know where I stand on the river. It’s an off-suit 8, making for one more hand I don’t beat. He checks again, and I finally decide I can’t value bet. He tables A8o and tells me I should have bet the turn, as he would have folded. I purse my lips and nod sagely in acknowledgement of his advice.
Unfortunately, the structure on these satellites sucked, and after going card dead and not playing a single pot for the next three levels, I was back on life support at the next break. I was also starving, and Todd and Joe (a guy from our home game who met us at the ‘Woods on his way to NY) had already gone to eat. I asked Rich if he wanted to eat after I busted, and he told me not to think like that. “You’re going to play a short stack really well against these guys.” True. “Just be patient. Especially in satellites, by desperation threshold is literally like 3 BB’s these days. If you ever get a hand, you can get back to average so quick.” True.
I do some more folds and shove AQ over a raise. Unfortunately my new table features a maniac old man who loves to shove his stack in retarded spots, so it’s once again tough to make moves. Then it happens: rockets, American Airlines, the holy grail of poker! At 800/1600, I make it 4100 UTG. The old man shoves, though unfortunately he recently got clipped after calling a re-raise with AJ and shoving a rag flop checked to him (obviously JJ insta-calls him). Then MP1 cold calls the shove. I’m up against A9 and QQ and hold up. Back in business, baby!
We’re approaching the bubble now, but I think I began overcompensating a little too soon. There were roughly 40 left in the tournament with 19 spots to pay. I had one of the biggest stacks at the table. Another big stack who’d been described to me as a little aggressive and capable of psychotic calls opens for 6000 from MP. I had the opportunity shove 35K more at him with AQo in the SB, but elected to fold. Probably bad.
Then with 38 left, I folded A8 in my BB to a 4x all in from a player smart enough to shove a very wide range from MP1. He showed me an A, though, so it may not have ended well for me if I called. The same player later re-stole from me twice when I tried to steal from late position. Eventually I took a BB from him by raising KTs to 8K from the button, blinds 1500/3000/400. He had only 19K behind, so I was prepared to race against him if necessary, and he knew he had no fold equity.
When blinds jumped again, everyone behind me was short enough to me to open shove from LP. I did this once with AQ and once with 99, showing the first time just for future credibility.
I made another mistake when I let an old man on my right, who’d been min-raising quite a bit and getting away with it (“It’s either a cheap steal or an invitation to raise, and it’s up to you to figure out which,” he’d explained) open limp my BB for 4000. I had like 48K, he covered, and I was going to shove a wide range. For some reason I convinced myself to take a flop with 97s, though I ended up folding bottom pair to a river bet. I should have just shoved pre-flop, there’s no way he calls, and as it turns out, I would need the extra chips.
Things really got hairy when blinds hit 3000/6000/1000. I decided that even with 23 players remaining, I could quickly end up in trouble with just 48K, so I took a shot at open shoving J9s from the button. The same good player in the BB had like 25K, but I still felt he’d fold a fair amount so that he could invest the last of his chips in a shove rather than a call. Unfortunately, he had AQs, but fortunately I spiked my J. GG yo.
With 21 left, I had 11 BB’s, and elected to call a 2x all in from a guy with whom I was kind of friendly holding 92s on my BB. He jokingly begged me not to call, but had no hard feelings when I did. He had AJ and turned the nuts, but I hit a runner runner flush that I didn’t even realize I had to bust him.
Things really started going slowly with 20 left and 19 to pay. I had a well above average stack and was prepared to fold everything, but then I started getting paranoid. I’ve had some really brutal bubbles in EPT and WSOP satellites in the last few months, and so when I got KK in the SB, I elected to shove and pick up some easy money. I showed, and the BB said she fold AJ. Wow, what a disaster it would have been if she made a monkey call. I reprimanded myself after that. Another guy thanked me for showing and told me he folded 88. “You would have called me in a second,” he told me. You go ahead and think that.
Finally the bubble burst, and I won my seat. At this point it was after midnight, and I still hadn’t eaten. I had some stale animal crackers with me, and I bought a muffin hoping to avoid eating those, but it turned out to be even staler. Screw you, Fifth Street Café! Anyway for some reason it took forever to process 19 vouchers, and then we all had to take our vouchers over to the cashier to enroll in tomorrow’s tournament.
At about 1 AM, Todd and I headed over to the hotel to check in. He’d made reservations the day before, but the old man at the front desk told us kind of insistently and bitchily that we didn’t have a reservation at any Foxwoods hotel. Finally he found it had been cancelled since we hadn’t checked in by 6PM. Todd had misunderstood this instruction on the phone and thought we had to CANCEL by 6. The guy was actually pretty helpful with reinstating the reservation and getting us the original rate. He also had the most disgusting teeth I’ve seen this side of the Atlantic, with most of them missing and the ones he did have discolored and jutting out in odd directions. Shudder.
The room was nice, very large with two large beds, nice furniture, a big bathroom shower, and even a balcony. I was disappointed to find the balcony door unopenable. I guess they figured out that a 17th story balcony was an invitation to disaster at a casino. After a late-night meal of stale animal crackers and Colin Ferguson, we turned in for the night.