Pro Donates to the Joe Fund

So I'm about an hour in to a session of 1/2 No Limit at Caesar's palace. Made 1 bad call and down probably 150-250, but as always, I've added-on to table max ($300), when a young pro looking dude I've seen before sits to my left. He's got headphones on, not talking or having fun, etc.

A hand or two in, young pro raises Pre-Flop in early position to probably $12. He gets 1 mid position caller and it folds through to me, Ad8d in the big blind.

Now this is an easy call thinking the guy is a decent player. A pretty standard raising range from early position from up front including plenty of hands I beat, and if not, ones that I can win a big pot from if I get a nice flop. If this guy was a 65yr old dude, I'd probably just fold because he's likely to be playing AQ+, QQ+ and I'm out of position to him and another player. Anyways, I call.

$37 flop:
8s8h3c

I think for a bit about how I'm going to make the maximum amount of money in this hand. If I bet out and neither player has anything, they'll just fold. And if I bet out and this pro has AA, he very well might just call and see what develops later on in the hand. So I decide to check-raise.

I check, pro bets $20, the other player folds. I decided to raise to $65 to build up a pot and make it hard for 99-AA to fold. To my delight, he then shoves his entire chip stack of about $280 into my. I obviously call, the board bricks out, and I show my A8 immediately to be nice to the guy, and take down the pot. He pretty obviously has a worse 8 with a hand like 78suited or 89suited or a big pair like AA or KK. Doesn't really matter.

This is a fairly standard hand, but is a good example of what can happen when you put a bit of thought into the best possible way to make the most amount of money out of your strong hands.

-Joe

Catching Up... Again

Catching Up... Again

It's been a while.

It's been over 3 months since my last post. I've moved to Vegas. I've traveled to St. Louis, San Diego, and Denmark (and played some at the latter 2 with great results). I've had some huge ups and downs in poker - a handful of big hero calls, a handful of really bad big bluffs, some bad river calls, and a tremendous number of interesting and funny stories. And I just haven't sat down at my keyboard and written about any of them. I'm pretty disappointed in myself for this, and will be putting a concerted effort into writing more regularly about all of the above. There's no way I could write about even a small portion of what I've been through without 10s of pages of long-winded content, so I'm just going to say the following: If you want to hear about a particular topic/story/trip, feel free to ask and I'll make it happen. Until then, I'm just going to focus on recent events.

Last Night - Dealer's Choice Home Game

I agreed a few days ago to spend yesterday hanging out with a buddy of mine in town that happens to be a dealer at one of the casinos I frequent, with complete disregard to what we might end up doing. So I showed up at his place and learned we'd be going to a barbecue at someone else's place. Cool! So we showed up, and it turns out to be the home of another dealer that I've seen and worked with a bunch from that same casino. Cool! So I met his wife, another dealer from the same place showed up, and I started messing around with a pack of cards that was left out. Almost immediately, the guys started talking about what poker games we should be playing, and after eating some and playing washers a bit, we got a small Dealer's Choice game going - completely unintentional on my part. I learned later that they do this regularly.

If you're not familiar with the Dealer's Choice format, whomever is the dealer first (this time decided by random card draw), will select whatever game of poker they'd like to play, and we play a full round of that game - equal to the number of players. In this case, 4-5 depending on who was doing what at the moment. Then, after that round, the next player to the left of the original dealer/game selector, will chose a game for the next rotation, and so on.

We drank a bunch, ate some barbecue, played some darts, and had a blast. I learned about some games I'd never heard of before - 5 Card Draw w/Harvey (my new favorite!), "Fuck You", and Super No Limit Hold 'Em. And I learned more about some other games that I had played very little or never before, but had heard/read some hand histories on: Big O (Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo with 5 cards instead of 4 in your hand),  2-7 Triple Draw, stud games, O8 (Fixed Limit Omaha Hi/Lo).

Overall it was a great time in general and I'll likely be playing with the guys on a weekly basis. I did end up winning a bit, even through my inexperience and several poor plays. I made some dumb calls, some poorly sized bets (usually too big for value when my opponents don't stand to have big hands). But fortunately I made a great bluff catch in 1 huge pot, and won another big one that I don't particularly remember, which put me back over even after being down a significant amount for most of the night. But hey, results aren't super important at a fun-times home game, and though it's nice to win, I certainly wouldn't be too upset if I hadn't.

T.H.O.R.S.E. @ Caesar's

Today I'm trying to get my own mixed game going at Caesar's, which isn't looking great for today as I haven't seen much interest. But I'll be regularly communicating it out to the "Mixed Game Poker in Las Vegas" Facebook group and running it every Monday night, so I'm sure eventually it'll stick. 

Push Comes to Shove - Poker Podcast

Myself and a buddy of mine from my last job, John, have started up a poker podcast. It's more about my lifestyle and the goofy stuff that goes on than anything else at this point. But I am covering at least 1 poker concept per episode as well as answering any questions John has as we go. We're not going to publish out to RSS/iTunes/Podcast apps until we have 3 episodes recorded. But if you're interested in watching us record live, follow my twitch: http://twitch.tv/8bitavenger and/or Twitter: http://twitter.com/dj8bitavenger

That's all I've got for now!

♠♥♣♦

Feel free to comment below or send any questions, comments, ideas, or w/e in to dj8bitavenger@gmail.com, and I'll make sure to incorporate the feedback into future posts.

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