Ooh Baby!

In the no limit Hold’em shootout today I wasn’t the first one out. That’s a step in the right direction! I ended up going broke when I moved in on the flop with an open ended straight draw. With just 1500 in chips to start with, so much of the play is straight forward. There seem to be so many new tournaments at the WSOP this year and strangely enough the buy ins for a majority of them are rather small. I was out before 2:00pm and Barry was the first one out at his table so we planned on resuming our pot limit Omaha match at 3:30pm. By about 3:45pm the following hand came down: I raised on the button to $6000 with J-4-5-8. Bary re-raised the pot to $18,000. Generally that’s not a very good play heads up since position is so important. Of course if your hand is strong enough there is nothing wrong with it as long as you proceed cautiously on the flop. The flop came 6-7-9 rainbow and Barry bet $25,000 on the flop. I’d noticed that when Barry raised before the flop he would always fire another bullet on the flop. With the dummy end of the straight, I decided to play cautiously by just calling. The turn came the Jack of diamonds putting a back door flush possibility on the board. Barry checked and I decided to make a relatively weak bet of $40,000. Barry thought about it for a while and then finally decided to raised me another $170,000! Yikes, decision time for me. The night before I laid down the second nuts straight when facing a big bet, but this situation was different. For one, I didn’t think Bary had 8-10 in his hand. I can’t go into detail as to why just in case he reads this, but lets just say that I felt like he had a hand like 10-Q-K with a diamond draw. What made the decision even tougher was that I was absolutely dominating play in the smaller pots. If I lost this pot I’d be giving up the lead to Barry while folding would have us sitting close to even. Ultimately I went with my read, though, and raised Barry his last $108,000 for a pot of $722,000. The river came a beautiful 3 of spades and Barry shook his head in disbelief. I was on the board, down 2-1. Had I known how Barry was going to play in the PLO heads up match, I never would have played him in stud again. That was a stupid decision on my part and it cost me half a million. Oh well, live and learn. *************************************************************** Barry headed to the cage to get more money and when he returned he let me know what we’d be playing: Stud 8 or better. As if I didn’t already know that! Within about an hour I got hit in the head with the deck, making straights, flushes, and scooping pot after pot. I was up $300,000 before we even got settled. Barry informed me that he’d never played this game heads up before. That surprised me a little bit, but it was good news for me as I have played lots of hours of Stud H/L heads up against the likes of Huck Seed, John Hennigan, and Phil Hellmuth (yum-yum:-) For the entire 8 hour session we played I never trailed for a second. I ended the night up $334,000 and feeling very confident about this match and the following matches. You see, in some senses Barry starts out with home court advantage. He gets to pick the games, so he will obviously pick the games where he feels he has the biggest edge. He beat me up in Stud, but I got the better of him in pot limit Omaha and am a big favorite to take the Stud 8. That means that Barry will eventually have to go down the list of games and play me in games where he feels less comfortable. In fact, I’m sure Barry was assuming that he’d be 3-0 and then have to fade me in my stronger games. He was “supposed” to have a lead after four matches, but if I win the Stud 8 we’ll be all tied up and moving into Hold’em territory. My confidence is soaring thanks to a nice rush of cards today and I’m very confident that Barry might be in big trouble the rest of the way. He is running out of games in a hurry, and again, if I go on to win the Stud 8 we’ll be all squared up thanks to my bone head decision to ask for a rematch in Stud! What was I thinking? *************************************************************** On a sad note, the little dog that I bought for my mother is sick. My mother took Princess to the vet and he informed her that she has Bronchitis and Pneumonia. He gave Princess some antibiotics, but informed us that the illness might get better, but it could also get much worse. Never buy a pet from a pet store. They just don’t treat the animals right. How could they try to sell me a sick dog for $1300? My mother took Princess back to the pet store to ask for an explanation. They informed my mother that she could have another dog, but that just didn’t sit well with me. What would they do with Princess? Put her back in those cages and make the others sick? Put her to sleep? I wasn’t having any of that, and there was no way they