The Turning of the Tides
I though I might be in for a huge loosing day today. The cards finally started running bad. (please bear with this post, it's not all me whining about beats).
I twice had lost with KK against AA and lost another half buy-in when my AK hit a King on the flop against AA. Then the mother of all beats (KK against QJ - he raised preflop and called my reraise. I bet out on a ten-high rainbow flop and he pushed all-in. I called. Turn King. River Ace. Ouch!) happened and I found myself in an early $2,000 hole.
I was three or four-tabling at the time (two on PokerStars and one or two on FullTilt) so my concentration was spread somewhat thin but nonetheless it didn't take me long to spot him.
Let's call him Mr. Orca, shall we?
I've never seen anything quite like him before even at smaller stakes. Not only was he the biggest maniacal whale I've ever seen (over 200 hands he ran at 91/68 - apologies for the jargon. This basically means that he saw every hand and raised with almost every hand). He didn't make small raises either. Typically he would raise the $6 blind to $42 or more.
None of this is all that unusually. One often comes across maniacs. Sometime they're at the table for a while the go through two or three buy-ins, maybe then run up a really big stack by getting lucky, but eventually they give it all back and leave with their tail between their legs.
This guy, however, did not stop rebuying. The level of contempt he showed for each $600 buy-in was astonishing.
Over the 200 hands that I spent with him he ran through precisely $10,125.
You know what else, don't you?
I didn't get any of it.
Without fail, the pots that I won from him were tiny and those that I lost were huge. He was like Robin Hood. He stole from me and then redistributed the wealth around the rest of the table, with a generous wad of his own dollars to boot.
It was as if his sole aim was to set me up but then he didn't care about donking off his chips to everyone else. He managed to bluff me out of some big pots early on before I caught on to his game. He showed those bluff, which meant that he was then in a position to value bet me to death. I paid him off.
At the worst point I was about $3,000 down. I managed to grind my third buy-in up to $900 before I finally flopped a big hand against him. I let him do the betting for me but he still managed to get away from the hand despite my all-in on the end giving him 5-1 odds. I guess he had shit!
That hand took me up to $1,400 and I'd almost got back from Mr. Orca what I had previously donated, but I was still in a sizeable hole and those was the last of his chips that I was going to get
Well, those we the last of chips that I was going to get directly. I have to thanks my lucky stars that one of the other players at the table forgot the cardinal rule of playing against a whale: value bet like hell against the whale but nut-peddle against everyone else. He just couldn’t let go of his aces:
I limped and called a small raise with 64 (oy, they were suited!). Four of us saw a Q 6 4 flop. Mr. Orca somehow managed to get of the way and I check-raised the preflop raiser who called. All the money went in on the turn of a 6 (he had me covered) and I scooped the biggest pot of my career to date - $2649.
The pot didn't stop me from being slightly miffed at not taking a greater proportion of the $10K that Mr. Orca dropped on the table - one chap must have taken over $5K of it - and eventually, for one reason or another Mr. Orca failed to redeposit and I was able finally to tear myself away from the screen.
I'd missed my Turkish class, hadn't eaten all morning, had won my biggest cash pot to date and yet I was still down $1,000.
In the grand scheme of things $1000 isn't that much. Even days of loosing $3,000 should be expected occasionally, but maybe, just maybe, my winning streak is over and the tides have begun to turn.
I twice had lost with KK against AA and lost another half buy-in when my AK hit a King on the flop against AA. Then the mother of all beats (KK against QJ - he raised preflop and called my reraise. I bet out on a ten-high rainbow flop and he pushed all-in. I called. Turn King. River Ace. Ouch!) happened and I found myself in an early $2,000 hole.
I was three or four-tabling at the time (two on PokerStars and one or two on FullTilt) so my concentration was spread somewhat thin but nonetheless it didn't take me long to spot him.
Let's call him Mr. Orca, shall we?
I've never seen anything quite like him before even at smaller stakes. Not only was he the biggest maniacal whale I've ever seen (over 200 hands he ran at 91/68 - apologies for the jargon. This basically means that he saw every hand and raised with almost every hand). He didn't make small raises either. Typically he would raise the $6 blind to $42 or more.
None of this is all that unusually. One often comes across maniacs. Sometime they're at the table for a while the go through two or three buy-ins, maybe then run up a really big stack by getting lucky, but eventually they give it all back and leave with their tail between their legs.
This guy, however, did not stop rebuying. The level of contempt he showed for each $600 buy-in was astonishing.
Over the 200 hands that I spent with him he ran through precisely $10,125.
You know what else, don't you?
I didn't get any of it.
Without fail, the pots that I won from him were tiny and those that I lost were huge. He was like Robin Hood. He stole from me and then redistributed the wealth around the rest of the table, with a generous wad of his own dollars to boot.
It was as if his sole aim was to set me up but then he didn't care about donking off his chips to everyone else. He managed to bluff me out of some big pots early on before I caught on to his game. He showed those bluff, which meant that he was then in a position to value bet me to death. I paid him off.
At the worst point I was about $3,000 down. I managed to grind my third buy-in up to $900 before I finally flopped a big hand against him. I let him do the betting for me but he still managed to get away from the hand despite my all-in on the end giving him 5-1 odds. I guess he had shit!
That hand took me up to $1,400 and I'd almost got back from Mr. Orca what I had previously donated, but I was still in a sizeable hole and those was the last of his chips that I was going to get
Well, those we the last of chips that I was going to get directly. I have to thanks my lucky stars that one of the other players at the table forgot the cardinal rule of playing against a whale: value bet like hell against the whale but nut-peddle against everyone else. He just couldn’t let go of his aces:
I limped and called a small raise with 64 (oy, they were suited!). Four of us saw a Q 6 4 flop. Mr. Orca somehow managed to get of the way and I check-raised the preflop raiser who called. All the money went in on the turn of a 6 (he had me covered) and I scooped the biggest pot of my career to date - $2649.
The pot didn't stop me from being slightly miffed at not taking a greater proportion of the $10K that Mr. Orca dropped on the table - one chap must have taken over $5K of it - and eventually, for one reason or another Mr. Orca failed to redeposit and I was able finally to tear myself away from the screen.
I'd missed my Turkish class, hadn't eaten all morning, had won my biggest cash pot to date and yet I was still down $1,000.
In the grand scheme of things $1000 isn't that much. Even days of loosing $3,000 should be expected occasionally, but maybe, just maybe, my winning streak is over and the tides have begun to turn.
posted by Pinky @ 3:47 PM
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