So sad, missed last night’s Monkey Tourney, no good reason, just a late day at work, get home exhausted, grab a bite for dinner, then promptly fall asleep on the couch before signing up for the game. Oh well, such things happen, so it will have to be next week all.
The reason for the exhaustion you ask? Well it may have had something to do with me staying up until 12:30 am playing in one of the local bar freeroll games. I love these freerolls, not so much for the play (most of which is terrible) but rather for the massive amounts of free drinks one can consume.
Free drinks you ask? Well our little freeroll tourney is actually a re-buy tourney. It’s free to sit down and play, but if you bust out and wish to get back in the game all you need to do is yell out “buying a round” and get everyone at your table a drink. I get very drunk. Actually the re-buy period ends after the fifth blind level is over, gives you a chance to sober up some before the drive home. The games typically last 4.5-5 hours and re-buys can be done during the first two hours. I always plan to be there in the game for at least two and a half hours.
These games are actually a challenge to win. You will see plenty of absolutely horrible plays and suck-out’s a plenty because it’s “free poker” (says the guy who just did his fourth re-buy of the night). It is just far too common to have four people go to showdown, so you all know how tough it can be to win a pot. The blinds are pretty brutal too. They go 10/20, 20/40 and 50/100. After that, just add a zero and repeat the cycle. Oh, and each level is 25 minutes long.
Anyways, after nursing my short stack for most of the night, I somehow ended up at the final table. I never quite understood this, but is seems that final table=forget how to play. Final tables usually go very quickly from nine players down to three. There seems to be only three ways to play. There is the ‘raise, call, call, all-in’ pre-flop or post-flop, the ‘raise, re-raise, all-in,’ and of course the all-in with atc for the shorties. It seems almost magical, but you can be assured that if there is a raise with two callers there will be an all-in somewhere down the line and the re-raise is an all-in magnet. Knowing that magical formula allowed me to take out five players just by saying ‘re-raise’ knowing that at least one person would be going all-in.
The guy I played heads-up with told us that he had never actually won one of these games before even though he had been heads-up several times before. It didn’t take long to find out why. He folded way too many on his small blind, folded way too often to any raise, and would never go to showdown without at least a pair. He won one huge pot off me early on when he hit a set to my TPTK, leaving me a 10:1 underdog, but thanks to his weak-passive play it didn’t even take me 20 minutes to eventually take him down to the felt. And the beautiful thing was when he was down to his last three chips he said “Well, I gotta do this sooner or later,” and threw them in, I said call without even looking at my cards. He showed AQo, and me, I flipped over the almighty hammer! With the board scattered all over the place, that two on the river allowed me to help him keep his record of never winning a tourney and also losing one to what some misguided souls call the worst hand in poker. So with $50 in my pocket for winning the freeroll I took him and the TD over to bar and bought us all a nice well-deserved drink.
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