Lots of Poker

Barry: Q-10-8-6 Flop: Q-2-5
Turn: 10
River: 9 On the flop I was a 71% favorite, but the majority of the money went in on the turn when I was a 38% underdog. No help on the river and Barry was back in it. A few hands later we got it all in again. This time the hands were as follows: Me: A-K-9-4
Barry: K-10-Jd-10d Flop: Kd 9d 5h (Barry was a 62% favorite on the flop when the money went in)
Turn: 5 (I became a 55% favorite)
River: 5 With that win, Barry took the lead and had me down as much as 170. I continued to chop away for the rest of the night and regained the lead shortly after. Going into the final hand of the night, again I had Barry down $312,000. Then we once again played for all the money with the following hands: Me: Qd-7d-5c-8s
Barry: As-6s-7s-8h Flop: 2s-4s-6d On that last hand I was about a 35% underdog, needing to hit a back door flush, a 3, 7, 8, or Q to win. I could also tie with a 5. No such luck though, and Barry ended the night down just $124,000. Considering the fact that I lost three all in pots to Barry totaling approximately $1,000,000 I feel pretty awesome about the fact that I’m STILL ahead $124,000. If I could have won just one of those big pots it would all be over. Well that would have been nice, but oh well, “That’s poker” as I’m becoming accustomed to saying. As for my thoughts on the match, very early on my worries that I may be an underdog in PLO vanished. I feel like I can win, but of course I said that about stud too and look how that turned out! While both stud and PLO have high fluctuations and luck plays a major role, I feel as though I may be better off against Barry in big bet poker than I would be in a structured limit game like stud. Stud is very technical and if two players are playing similarly it will all come down the luck of the cards most often. However, with pot limit Omaha there is more room for imagination and creativity which suits me better I think. In the three hours we played PLO, Barry really never got the best of me. Aside from winning those three all in pots and another $350,000 pot when he flopped a King high flush to my Queen high flush, I dominated play for the most part. It sure helps when you hit some flops and I definitely hit more flops than Barry did. I even made some flushes too, yippee! I’m really looking forward to the conclusion of this match. Being down 0-2 already is tough and I need a win to get back on track. That’s why it would have been so nice to finish Barry off quickly and move on to the next game. Something tells me that if I would have won the match early that Barry wasn’t going to ask for a rematch. This is just a guess, but I’m assuming that his next choice will be Stud H/L. Chances are we won’t be seeing any hold’em for quite some time. All told I lost $113,000 on the night. -$237,000 in stud and +$124,000 in pot limit Omaha. Could have been better, could have been worse I guess. Tomorrow is the no limit hold’em shootout and I’m going to give it my all. If I continue to stay positive and focus on playing my best I know that the results will come. In fact, I may have mentioned this before, but I’m really proud of myself. When I was younger a run like this would have destroyed my confidence and had me negative and bitter. It probably would have also had me in some strip joint at 6:00am sulking about my bad luck. Those days are long gone for me. Having God in my life puts everything into perspective. You have to take the good with the bad. If you can only be happy when fortunes are smiling on you, what does that say about your character? I know it’s tough, I’m living through it right now. I’ll tell you what though, rough patches are a whole lot easier to get through when you know that you are not alone. ]]>