Last Night's Crazy Game

Last night, a private cash game for some of the regulars of Cardschat was planned. The idea was that everyone save their PokerStars hand histories and send them to the organizer (Zachvac) so that he can compile it, and then have someone - I don't think it's been decided on who, yet - make a video commentary using a hand replayer and all hole cards shown.

I wasn't really sure I could make it originally, but there were some last minute drop-outs so I joined in for a little while. Given that that the stakes were pretty low for all of us, that it was a game where everyone at the table knew that everyone were pretty solid players, and last but not least that there would be a video made out of the resulting hands, the game was sure to be wild. I fully expected it to be.

I was not disappointed.

The pedagogical value of this video might be, ehm, questionable, but it should be amusing. Light 3-bets? I think Zach was running at 20%. Limper? Raise any-two to "punish the limper." Raiser and a cold-caller? Squeeze with any-two.

Given that I expected the game to be this way, I actually had time to device a game plan before even sitting down. I was going to play tight poker and just set a trap for the spewiness that was bound to ensue. I didn't need a monster to stack someone, but I wasn't going to get involved in trying to out-level my opponent's (on the 7th or so level of I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know...), either.

I spent a lot of the first few pots I was involved in just folding to raises and bets. If they were paying attention - and I have reason to believe that they did - I must have seemed weak-tight. Not a bad image to have in a game where people are hell-bent to bluff at every opportunity, let me tell you.

So I pick up AQo, open from the cut-off and Zach unsurprisingly 3-bets from the small blind. His range here is, to say the least, "wide." Everyone else has folded and it's a really easy call for me with 100BB effective stacks and 8 more BB to call. The flop comes 7-7-6, two-tone, and Zach leads out for $4.50 in a $6 pot. Now, I don't exactly have the monster I was looking for, but my hand is better than his average hand at this point, for sure. The only hands I expect him to check are monsters, so it's a bit of a relief that he bets.

I call, keeping the option to raise/shove any turn open. My range (if my weak-tight image actually held true) should be pretty strong here given the preflop call of a 3-bet and now calling the flop, also. The turn is an ace, the pot is $15, and Zach shoves for his remaining $17, and I snap-call. He turns over K-9, and I'm not the least bit surprised, heh. He figured it was a good card to bluff, which I suppose might be true.

I didn't stick around for very long, maybe 35 minutes or so, but it was a wild and fun game. I did make some lay-downs that I don't necessarily think were appropriate... I think a good argument for shoving 6-6 after what seems like an obvious squeeze could be made. And, uncharacteristically for this game, I opted against raising a flush draw on the flop (the horror!). But when you have four out of six people trying to push the entire table around, adopting a careful but maybe weak approach is never going to be a losing style, unless you completely overdo it.

If you had wanted to find the table at PokerStars, it would have been easy. All you had to do was bring up the $25NL 6-max tables and sort by average pot-size. Our table was at $15. Yep, the average pot-size was 60BB.

Fun game.

Will be interesting to see how the video turns out. And if I get berated for my weak-tight style.