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June 19, 2006
Bad beats galore.
After getting beat up on in some SNGs tonight when hands didn't hold up, I switched to a low limit ring game.
Jesus. I was better off in the SNGs.
I catch pocket 9s and know I'm going to flop a set. When the 9 hits on the flop, I'm not surprised, I just bet it, and hard. Luckily, the big stack has pocket queens and keeps calling straight to the river when I go all-in ... and another queen hit. Insert appropriate colorful language.
Or how about a flop of A-5-2s when I'm holding 6-7s against one opponent? My opponent raised all-in, I called and saw pocket nines. The turn comes and those pocket 9s turned into a four flush.
Insert creative use of English, Spanish, Italian and some gutter-punk Japanese I picked up some years back.
There were more, but the long and short of it is that I got my money in with the best hand and then ... here comes the suck out.
I think I finished down a bit for the night ... probably quite a bit down. Two blown SNGs (an $11+1 turbo, which I'll never do again), and a suck out in the $10+1 which knocked me out in 6th place, plus some gnarly suck outs in the ring games, and I'm happy to be close to my original deposit.
Perhaps the most annoying part is that one of the people persisted in saying nice hand when people were all-in before the flop or sucked out (i.e. "Oh, you caught a four-flush at the turn after making a donk play and going all-in with pocket 9s after the board flopped spades and you got called by someone with a made flush? Nice hand." or "Oh, you ran your A-Qo into pocket jacks pre-flop and you won the race? Nice hand. Very well-played."). Let me be clear about this:
There is nothing nice about sucking out. There is no skill in it. You did not outplay the other person. You dodged a bullet. Rivering a set of queens to beat a flopped set of 9s (and, in fairness, it's really hard to make people realize their top pair is beat, especially with a big pocket pair) is not a good play. It's dumb luck to catch a two-outer at the river to beat a made hand. A suck out is never a nice hand. You should be ashamed of them, not congratulating people. A suck out only occurs when a bad play is made, when someone makes an incorrect decision. Since poker is, in large part, decided by making correct decisions, celebrating the screw ups only encourages people to think they're playing well ...
Hey ... maybe I should start telling people who suck out on me in ring games nice hand more often ... maybe they'll play with crap more often and I'll realize a better EV down the road ...
In other words, feed the fish.
But it still sucks to know that I, even with my limited skills, was the best player at the table and my hands just didn't hold up. Such is life.
Posted by puckett at June 19, 2006 09:07 AM
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