I posted off topic yesterday about a special at my supermarket, yogurt cups that were regularly $0.61 on ‘sale’ at 5/$3. If your brain is too fried after calculating pot odds for the past few hours, that’s a penny off on each cup. Wuhoo.
If I thought that was a lousy deal, however, I should have waited for the specials on set over set at the 20k/40k Hagia Sofia tables.
To be fair, the first table was fine. I was up 1.6 million chips in 29 hands before the action died with two empty seats and four sitting out. Figuring that 60k in blinds every three hands wasn’t a bargain, I moved to a neighboring table.
The cards didn’t come as quickly there. After roughly the same number of hands, I was only about 500,000 to the good.
Then, sitting under the gun plus one, I looked in at a pair of fours. Since river-dancing aces in an early position aren’t as brimming with potential as the ones standing on both legs like Cristiano Ronaldo over a free kick. I opted to just call.
Two players who might have been failed river dancers limped into the pot behind me, and the big blind checked.
When the flop came J-x-4, my green eyes were smiling even though they aren’t Irish.
The big blind checked again.
I bet half-pot.
Everyone but him left the stage. He stuck around but allowed me to set the price on each street.
I kept betting half-pot.
He kept calling.
I have no idea why he didn’t check-raise on the river since, rather than one jack in his hand, he was holding two, commonly referred to as the nuts. Despite his reluctance to take more of my chips, his set of Bulgarian fishermen tossed my three river dancers into the Iskar with extreme prejudice.
Happy to come away from that debacle with minimal stack erosion, I put the beat behind me, as yet aware that it was Buy-One-Get-One Monday at the Hagia Sofia.
In my defense, Replay doesn’t advertise bad beats like a blue-light special, although they’re clearly well stocked.
One circuit of the table plus two more hands found me blissfully ignorant in the big blind with queens. Again, everyone limped pre, and I made a pot raise.
The player to my immediate left, who’d only been present a few hands, three-bet. I clicked on his chair and found him to be the third player in the past week who was playing at this level with his entire bankroll on the table. I had thought that unusual, but maybe they don’t qualify for the bad beat specials.
While I was checking him out, the table folded around to the small blind, who called. I was getting squeezed from both sides, but since the small blind hadn’t four-bet, I felt like I had to call with the ladies.
The flop wasn’t the best, coming x-K-x.
Wanting to know where I was, I bet half-pot after the small blind checked. Mr All-or-Nothing to my left folded (???), but the small blind decided after a brief pause to hang around.
I didn’t particularly like that. Calling my preflop raise made his having a king a distinct possibility. An innocuous card fell on the turn, and I checked, expecting him to seize the initiative.
Only, he didn’t. Either he was slowplaying or had missed the board. Whichever it was, a queen came on the river. I had hit another set. For the briefest instant, the king on board seemed less daunting. Then Small Blind bet.
Worse, it was a difficult bet to decipher. It wasn’t a full-on jam on his part, but hardly a reluctant nibble. The pot was around 1.5 million, and he put out 1.9. That left me plenty of room to three-bet with him having about 2 million behind. He could have just as easily been baiting me to call as bluffing me into a fold. I glanced at my chest to confirm I wasn’t wearing a red shirt with a Starfleet insignia.
In trying to think it through, I could only put Small Blind on one of four hands, those being aces, kings, ace-king, and king-queen. Nothing else made sense.
In the moment, my thinking was that the only one of those four hands that beat me was kings, and they, along with KQ were the least likely of the four choices. There were only three combinations of each available to him, whereas there were all six combinations of AA, and a dozen of the sixteen AKs. A bit of quick math told me there were 21 good outcomes versus three bad, 7-1 odds in my favor.
If I had more time, I might have reasoned that aces weren’t likely. For starters, he hadn’t four-bet preflop. Few Replayers do, even at that level, but that was the spot where they almost certainly would. Nor would I expect him to be as frisky on the river with a king and queen on the board and my having raised pre. At a live table, I’d have probably realized he had at least one king in his hand.
Regardless, that only dropped the odds against him having pocket kings to 5-1, and again, I had a set of queens. Letting them go would have been a true hero fold, and my name isn’t Peter Parker.
I called.
He had the kings.
BOGO.
Set over set twice in the space of eleven hands had cost me nearly 3 million chips. Not what I’d call an ideal shopping experience.