The Book of Bad Beats

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Name: Cardgrrl
Location: Washington, DC

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Saturday, October 10, 2009

Crubs Get There

We have our first brave contributor! Submitted for your consideration by Rakewell (aka The Poker Grump):

OK, I'll give this a shot. I had one today—kind of a classic of the genre. Not extraordinary, mathematically speaking, but illustrative.

Bally's, Vegas, $1/2 NLHE. I'm in big blind (Seat 1) with 9c-9d. Seat 4 limps. Seat 5 makes it $10. Seat 7 calls. Seat 8 calls. I call. Seat 4 calls. Pot is about $45 after $5 rake. Flop is 9h-7c-2c, giving me the nuts. I check, highly confident that there will be a bet and at least one call, allowing me to trap some money with a check-raise. Sure enough, Seat 5 bets $15 after Seat 4 checks. Seat 7 calls. Seat 8 calls. I push it to $50. Everybody folds except Seat 8, who calls. He is the newest at the table, having arrived only a few hands before, so I know nothing about him except that (1) he came from a limit game and most of his chip stacks are still white $1 chips, and (2) he's wearing a PokerStars jersey. Pot is now about $175. Turn is an offsuit 5. I ask for a count of Seat 8's chips. He has $129 left. I have him covered and move all-in. He takes less than two seconds to call. I show my hand. He shows Kc-Jc. River: 6c. Flush gets there. I lose.

He had to call $129 to win about $304 ($175 already in the pot plus the $129 I pushed into it on the turn), giving him about 2.4:1 pot odds, with no additional implied pot odds if he hit. I had one club, so, though he didn't know it, there were only 8 of them left, and two of those would pair the board, giving me a full house. So he had one pull at 6 outs. Odds against hitting 38:6, or 6.3:1 against. In other words, he was willing to pay nearly three times what he should have seen as the break-even price to draw.

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