PLO beats: do they even exist? Here's a hand I played from my last live session, detailed in my previous post. Tarantino says that movies are like S&M, and the audience is the M. That would apply here as well, but who am I to say you're not allowed to read something so boring it could actually kill you? I mean, you are reading a blog.

A kid had come into the game who was well-known to the other two players in the game but not to me. He brought his chips from a NL game that he had apparently been running over, and I think it was about $800 or so. He then proceeded to win every pot he played for the first 15 minutes or so, and basically showed himself to hate folding even more than I do and to have the marginal understanding of PLO that decent NL players usually have. He happily got 2/3 of his chips in before the flop with AQQT against an extremely nitty NL reg who was playing PLO for maybe the 2nd time in her life, so her reraise (and possibly even a first raise) was always Aces, and obviously flopped gin and held up. I didn’t have many playable hands during that period, and the ones that I did play, I played aggressively and he conceded on the flop. He was young, and handled his chips confidently, but his clothing and something about his demeanor suggested that he was a rich kid as opposed to an internet pro. He seemed to get off on making moves, so I assumed he was very anxious to make one on me.

I had passed my button twice in a row, 4-handed, so I put in a raise in a straddled pot when I picked up JT62 double-suited to the J and T. The rich kid (the aptly named Victor) called in the SB, and the BB called. Both players had about 1500 and I covered. The flop was Q62r, giving me bottom 2 and 2 backdoor flush draws. It was checked to me and I bet 70. Victor check-raised to 200, which I expected him to do a huge percentage of the time with whatever he had. I expected him to have something approaching pure air a lot, but even hands like 4567 have a lot of equity against me, so I decided to reraise. I also expected him to jam his hand some of the time, even with air, so I was definitely leaning toward calling a shove. I reraised to 600, and he thought a few seconds before calling. The turn was a J, bringing a flush draw but not for me, and then he shoved his last 700 in fairly quickly. The whole thing reeked so bad of bull****, but still, I had to consider that he may’ve flopped something like top and bottom pair that he hoped was good, and then turned Qs and Js, which he would like much more. A set was seeming really unlikely, though, because it’s not the kind of flop where you would look to take a card off, since an inside wrap is the biggest draw. One thing that did give me pause is that I hadn’t gotten a good physical read on the guy at that point, and I generally like to have some sort of strong physical tell before I commit 130BBs w/ 2 pair on a dry board. Here, I just had the general sense that he would not wait very long before trying to make a big move on me, and the pot odds of 3:1. I hesitated a couple of beats and called. He looked up sheepishly and said, “Do you have a flush draw?” I shook my head. “I have a straight draw,” he giggled, not turning his hand over. The dealer dealt an offsuit 4, and I was pretty sure I had lost. Victor showed his 53, and when the dealer asked to see his whole hand, he revealed 3458 no flush draw.

That was an irritating hand, probably only because it came on the heels of some losses for me and threatened to turn a great night into an OK one; I normally don’t get annoyed with someone putting their chips in bad against me. It was a little more annoying when he immediately began racking up and quit very shortly thereafter, but he was very classy about the win and was just fun to play with in general--nh Victor. I plowed on in a very good game after he quit; it was me, the NL nit from before, and another college kid who is a wannabe pro but who’s painfully tight and straightforward as well. There honestly weren’t a lot more interesting spots throughout the night, because I was just stealing lots of small pots and running away quickly whenever they bet or raised. If I ever decided to look either one up even slightly light because I thought it might’ve gotten too obvious how much respect I was giving their aggression, they showed me the super-nuts. $3k was a nice win for me, and I was tired by 6am, but still, I was sick when the game broke with $2400 on the table between them. All in all, it was a fun night.