The Bat Cave

This is going to be a massive week of poker for me. Fortune is giving away $373,000 in High Hand money over the next week and I plan to get more than my fair share of it. The actual promotion is $499 every 15 minutes and goes from 9 AM tomorrow until 3 AM next Tuesday morning. Absolutely wild. And I’m so here for it.

As it stands, I am currently stuck a shade under $6k for the month of April. It’s been a miserable month for me. I had a good mini-session of 3/5 at Fortune and I’ve been enjoying playing 1/3 lately, so I made the mistake of testing my never-ending streak of unbelievable bad luck in 3/5 at Palace/Aces.

Notable Hand #1: Zinky opens to $20 from MP, cutoff and button call, and I look down at KK in the small blind. I make it $135 and only the button calls. Flop is Q64 rainbow and I make a small bet of $60 and my opponent essentially snap calls. The turn pairs the 6 and I bet $150 and again the button calls almost immediately. The river is a 7 and I shove for my remaining $235. Now my opponent goes into the tank. We are about 2 minutes deep when he asks for a count. At this point, I was 70% sure I was doubling up, 15% thinking he might fold, and 15% remembering that I haven’t won a significant pot in the Aces 3/5 game in like a year and wondering how I would react if I somehow didn’t have the best hand here. Finally, this fucking piece of absolute dog shit puts in the call and turns over 77. I WAS SEEING RED. I don’t know this dude at all so I don’t know what the fuck this was about. There is no logical strategic explanation for his thought processes here, so he either did it on purpose or he’s a special kind of moron. With all the accumulated tilt from this game over the past year, I was having a hard time keeping my emotions in check. I wanted to slam this dude’s face into the table. Losing the hand as it played out was brutal enough, but the savage slow roll on top of it just couldn’t be real life. There was a list for the game, so I disappeared for about thirty minutes and I’d be lying if part of me didn’t hope I was picked up before I got back so I could leave.

Notable Hand #2: Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I got moved to the main game and reloaded. I had a bit over $1K when this next hand came up. I opened to $20 UTG with 77, Bone called UTG1, another player called in MP, and a very nitty player tried to make it $95 on the button. Somehow he put a green chip from another establishment into the pot, however, and the raise was only to $70. I can’t say for sure if this made a difference in me calling, but it certainly made it easier. We all came along. The flop was a favorable looking A75 with two hearts. It checked to the button and he bet $60. I decided to flat for a few reasons: a) this is a very small bet and if the button doesn’t have an ace, he’s not going to put any more money into the pot and b) AA is very much in the button’s range (whereas hands like AQo are probably not) and is certainly a hand he would make a tiny bet with. I know this is a dangerous way to play this hand, but I was going to take my chances and see what happened. I got a nice surprise when one of the other players made it $260 to go, the button just called (which he probably would not do with AA), and now I made it $560 to go with what I was sure was the best hand. The other player was puzzled, but ended up folding and the button called. He might have AK here, but I was pretty sure he had an ace high flush draw and still a tiny bit concerned it could be AA. The turn was the 2 of hearts and with only $450 remaining and the off chance he had AxKh, I bet $300 and he snap put me all in and I called, saying, ” I hope it’s a flush.” He did indeed have exactly the AKhh and the river didn’t fill me up and I was down another $1000.

Nothing too crazy about that hand other than the fake $25 chip that may or may not have been the difference between me calling pre or not lol. Otherwise, it’s just a standard big spot cooler that I am never on the right side of in this game. The rest of my session didn’t go any better and I ended up losing over $2600.

I followed that nightmare session up with my worst cash game day of poker ever, losing a combined $3514 between 1/3 and 20/40 at Fortune last week.

So I have a goal for this High Hand promotion. I want to play at least 60 hours and I want to win $10,000. Is that absolutely stupid? Of course! Is it realistic? Hell no! Is it in the realm of potential outcomes? You’re damn right it is.

My plan is to play Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and TBD on Sunday or Monday or both. I’m hoping to be in a game by noon each day and the plan is to play until at least midnight. The only day I know I’m taking off for sure is Thursday. I want to be at Fortune by 10 AM most days and hopefully don’t have to wait longer than a couple hours if I do that.

There are 120 players in action if the room is full which I imagine it will be most of the time during the promo. That makes everyone’s fair share of the promotion $16.63 an hour. But I’ll be playing limit games which are not only substantially faster than 1/3 and 3/5, but also get to showdown more frequently. I’ll make a bold assumption that my fair share of the HH promo is closer to $20/hour. So if I actually put in the 60 hours, my HH expectation is somewhere around +$1200. Let’s hope to do much better than that! I don’t plan to do much detailed hand histories, but I think it would be fun to blog my progress during this promo, so check back for that.