Last night, I finished reading the final novel in Adrian McKinty’s ‘Troubles’ trilogy, titled “In the Morning I’ll Be Gone,” about a detective in 1980s Northern Ireland. This particular case finds the protagonist recruited by British intelligence to locate a former schoolmate who has become an IRA terrorist. In the process, the detective must solve a locked-room murder (in which a body is found in a room with all doors bolted from the inside and windows barred). The mystery is how the murderer managed to kill the victim and escape unseen.
It occurs to me that bad beats are the exact opposite of that scenario. The winner of the hand essentially murders you in broad daylight in front of witnesses, leaves you out in the open, and there’s often little or nothing you can do about it other than wonder how the f— it happened.
As I discussed in a previous thread, I’ve been subjected to a barrage of beats for a while now. That continued early today, with two or three hands in which I was 70% or better after the flop all going due south on the turn and/or river.
Then I entered, appropriately enough, the 250k Against All Odds tournament, where I found myself seated with three or four players ranked in the top 1,000. Captianche busted early (not my doing), but the most active of the remaining elitists was Tygranis91.
He (I’m presuming gender in my limited knowledge of binomial nomenclature) was regularly making pot raises pre-flop, then, when called, catching cards, which I mentioned in the course of friendly chat with him and another player.
The problem for me was that he was seated directly to my left. While he folded about half the time, there was a streak in which he raised four successive hands and I woke up in the big blind with AT.
When he raised once more from under the gun, I was certain he was getting out of line and I shoved. He called with AK only for the board to fill in my straight possibility, double me up to about 20k in chips, and leave him with about 6600.
Before I could apologize for sucking out after making a completely erroneous assessment, I was whisked off to another table. When the tournament ended, I checked the final table and found he had managed to just make the money, finishing tenth of ten paid, which only marginally eased my guilt at having used his chips to win the thing, as I understood all too well how he must have felt.