I Was Told There'd Be Moments Like These

An experienced player once told me that if you play long enough, you'll see pretty much everything, and if you play even longer, pretty much everything will happen to you.

Yesterday, after busting out of the weekly 250+25 with KK going down to AA, which has happened to almost anyone who has played, I found myself in a cash game with the same hand and a more unusual fate.

The table was loose and aggressive, not what I am used to seeing at the club I've been playing at lately, and there were a number of questionable players and a good amount of chips spread about. I had been playing fairly tight, slowly rebuilding my stack to just over 400 (I was in for 500) after making a fairly foolish stand on my first hand as JT lost to QT.

At any rate, the fateful hand occurred as the player under the gun, two seats to my right, opened the pot to 12. This was a standard raise for the table and from this guy meant pretty much of anything. He had 158 exactly, and had re-bought a number of plays after showing a tendency to make quite poor calls. I was pretty happy after 2nd UTG folded to me and I found those cowboys peeking back up at me.

Question was, how to get heads up against this guy and get some money in the pot. I was afraid an overbet might scare him out but also afraid too small a bet would see multiple callers behind. I made it 30, hoping to bank on my tight play discouraging additional customers. The number was right as it folded around to my mark, who simply called.

The flop came JJ4 rainbow. This was not perfect as a jack was in several of the range of hands this gent would play, but certainly better than the ace I had really been worried about.

I wanted to get all his chips in the pot but also to avoid giving him cheap cards, so I made it 50 to go. In character, he called behind.

At this point, I gave a brief thought to the possibility he might be slowplaying a jack, but I consoled myself that if that was were we were at, I really couldn't do much about it as I did not have a hand I could back off of on an aceless board given his stack size.

My worries dissolved when the turn filled me up with a beautiful king. Again he checked. Thinking that an all-in bet was likely to get called as looking scared, I pushed. I was right. Oh was I right.

He got me with a fishhook in each eye.

The only way I get away from this hand would have been if a butterfly's wings in China had slowly lifted a speck of dust up into the stratosphere, to be carried around the globe until setting down in air intake of the building, through the ducts and into his nasal membrane at just the moment I was reaching for chips, inducing a massive sneeze and flipping those damned Jacks up in front of me. It didn't happen that way, and the case king didn't fall on the river either.