It’s Friday night. It’s been two weeks. My ten two regular readers know what I’m talking about. Except it didn’t happen. With a lot of last minute bail outs, my bi-weekly home PLHE tournament didn’t happen this week. Not enough people, so I had to pull the plug. But one of the regulars was really jonesing for poker and kept pinging me on IM all afternoon. So, at 5:30 I made one last concerted effort to try to get enough to at least play a little dealer’s choice. In the end I could only line up four guys, but they were the hardest of the hardcore in our group, so I figured we could get a few hours of poker in before people decided to bail.
Instead, we had the most fun I’ve had at the poker table in a long time. Part of that may have been the beers that were flowing freely (often during the tournaments I’ll drink a couple beforehand while I wait for people to arrive and then a bunch afterwards, but I try to stay pretty sober during the actual tournament). Part of it may have been trying out some new games (we ran the gamut of WSOP event games with a few specialty dealer’s choice thrown in)
The most interesting hand of the night, by far, was an Omaha HiLo hand. I had AA27, triple suited if I recall correctly and I raised and was called by the three others. The flop came A55 and I was giddy. I call the flop bet in front of me and it’s called by one other to take it to three-way. The turn is a second ace. I’ve hit quads and there may not even be a qualifying low. I just called the opening bet (a mistake) and we were again three heading to the river. It came with the third five, which was potentially the best card I could have hoped for. I expected the guy behind me to have the case five after his previous, so I checked the bet to me. I realized that was a huge mistake when he simply called the single bet.
But here is where things got interested. I started moaning about not raising and the first guy in the pot said he would have re-raised. I said “Really? Well, I’ll bet a side-pot that I’ve got you beat.” He immediately agreed and re-raised me in the side pot. I re-raised him and asked how far he wanted to go and he pushed the rest of his chips into the middle. At this point I felt I may have been taking advantage and said we could just bet on the first $2 after his re-raise (we generally play .50-1.50 stakes). He was adamant that he wanted to play like this and then flipped his hand, declaring that he only needed one card. Of course he had the five. I told him I actually needed two cards and turned my aces. The stunned look on his face was classic. Thankfully he was satisfied with the way the hand turned out (unorthodox side-bet and all) and he bought right back in to continue the night. The other player in the regular hand had KK, which was certainly a reasonable call with the size of the pot (though I guess he should have expected at least one ace out there, in which case he was drawing dead, well, except to the low. Lord, there’s too much to think about in Omaha HiLo)
So, in the end it was a great night of beer, pizza and cards. I was the victor for the night, even after a brutal game of Murder By 7s early on (which we vowed we would never play again) It was a combination that it is difficult to beat, particularly with the great core of guys I have in my regular game. And it reminded us how much fun it could be to toss the cards without the constraints of a tournament. (Special curses go to Pauly for the Anaconda rules I kept reading about. We had a simpler version we tended to play but when I told them I read about some other rules online, we adopted something similar to the Blue Parrot version which we quickly dubbed Fuckedaconda. I leave it to the reader to fill in the details)
Dude… ANACONDA is death… it sucks up your bankroll!
But you make it sound so good in your write-ups. :)
I didn’t mind too much because I ended up winning a piece of the pot each time we played it. There were definitely worse games that we played.
The guy with KK would have beaten someone with one ace. One ace would have been trip Aces only. There wasn’t another card on the board to match to complete his boat. Remember with Omaha you have to use two cards from your hand. KK would have used both cards to have 5s full of Ks, and only had to fear AA or the fourth 5. He had the third best hand possible.
I think I may have recognized that at the time, but it was lost in the drunken haze.