Articles / John Tabatabai / 02 August 2011 /

Since my last update I was mainly playing cash games at the Venetian and although I had some fun there, I can't really remember any hands that were too interesting. But I did play the $5k event at the Wynn, which was their Main event and in that I had a super interesting hand, I'd say the most interesting hand of my life!

So we're at level one and the blinds are 50/100. You start with a 25k starting stack and it's a 90-minute clock, it's a slow structure, a really good tournament. My table wasn't terrible but it wasn't the greatest either but I suppose for a $5k event it was pretty good. There's one guy who just has no clue and a couple of others who are really good.

Early on the following hand occurred which is important to my interesting hand as it gives us some information. A player in early position raised and villain called on the button. One of the blinds called and the flop came down jack-ten-three with two clubs and one diamond. The blind checked, the original raiser bet and villain called and the blind folded. Villain had called on the button with 9c8c so he'd flopped the absolute world. The turn was the seven of diamonds, the original raiser checked and then called villains bet. The river is the two of diamonds bringing in a backdoor diamond flush and the original raiser checks and villain checks behind and says "I wanted to be safe in case you had diamonds!" he had kings by the way.

Twenty minutes later and my hand occurred. The super donkey of the table limped, villain is in the small blind and he called. I had AsKh in the big blind and made it 500 in total, super donkey called and villain said, "I can't keep letting you run me over, I call too." The flop came down 9s8s2s, villain bet 600 into 1,500, I flat called at this stage and super donkey folded. The turn was the three of diamonds and villain guy then bet 1600. I still had plenty of outs, but I didn't really think he was bluffing because of the way he was. He'd hardly played any hands and was quite passive, but my hand was too strong to fold so I called. The river is the beautiful queen of spades and he made an actual sigh but then bet 3,300, which was super strange. The only hand I would have been losing to was JsTs which he would never have so I spent two minutes looking at him before raising to 8,100. As soon as I did that he just swung around in his chair and said, "Now it's my time to stare at you!" which again I thought was a really weird thing to say. He looked at me for not very long, about 30 seconds, before re-raising me another 12,000! I mean it was the end of the first level of a four day tournament and I would have only had 3,000 chips left if I had called, from a starting stack of 25,000!

I wanted to call because he could easily have had the king of spades and I am a massive station as it is but despite being super life tilted I ended up folding and showing my hand and he had the JsTs. As soon as I showed my hand Felipe Ramos came over and gave me a high-five and tweeted about my hand, which I thought was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I never got back into it and during Level 4 one guy had started three-betting me a lot and I had started to four-bet him pretty lightly so when I picked up queens I was delighted and super excited to get my money in against him. I did and he had ace-king and my hand didn't hold, and that was that.

In my next post, later this week, I will go through my thought process in the hand to show that with hindsight my fold was actually easy but at the time it was certainly one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting hand of my life.

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