I was in a neighborhood tourney a few weeks ago and had a pretty nice hand. Here’s how it went…

I started with and came into the hand with a pre-flop bet, probably double the BB. One opponent calls my bet to stay in the hand with . The flop comes up . A nice straight draw for me, and my opponent paired their A to feel compelled to stay in the hand. I don’t remember exactly how my betting went (it’s been two weeks since this game!), but rest assured I was betting or raising from the flop through each round.

The turn comes up and now I’m really starting to like this hand. Not only does my straight draw improve with more outs, but also I’m now looking at a flush possibility. To make it even better, my opponent paired their 9, so now with two pair AA 99 they are feeling pretty good.  They should be…they still have me beat. They had to think I’d be on a straight draw but also knew I couldn’t have it yet. The pot was pretty big by now, and I pushed all in before the river and they called me. Mind you, I don’t have anything at this point in time, but with a flush draw and multiple straight draws (and my good luck up to this point in the game) I decided to play the odds and go for it.

The river comes up and it took me a few seconds to realize that yeah, I hit my flush, but also hit the straight, too! Straight flush…woohoo!

So, nice hand, took the pot and knocked the player out at the same time. Gotta love it.

The first few hours of the night were beautiful. Good cards, some luck thrown in, and a table that didn’t change players and allowed me to get into a rhythm. I was getting favorable cards and was able to establish some aggressive play early on (*note: not exactly my style of play, but what the hell it’s fun to mix it up when you can). I took out two players (the person to my left took out the other three as the game wore on) and was sitting behind a nice pile of chips. I even found a Q-high straight flush (read about that hand in a later post) on the river to really hammer home the fact the cards were falling my way!

And then…

Then what? Well, let’s take a 15 minute break, grab some food, up the blinds (throw in an ante), add a new player to my left who likes to start each hand either folding or raising AT LEAST double the BB, and suddenly I can’t get a decent hand of cards to save my life! Plus we were playing four-handed so the blinds were coming around awful quick. I spent the next several hours looking for something to play with and not getting much.

Anytime I had something half way decent, like somebody to my left would throw down a monster raise, or the occasional maniacal pre-flop “all in” and I would end up folding – and usually after seeing the flop I was glad I did. My whole game went from attack mode to defend mode, and from there it was all downhill. I suppose I could have represented some better hands, but anytime I tried to use my chip stack to bully someone, they raised into my weak-assed hole cards and I ended up throwing away chips.

Looking back, I think this is the first time I’ve left a game where I didn’t win and still I wasn’t in a bad mood. I had fun, got some good cards for a while, put some players on hands, and paid more attention to things like pot odds and hand odds to help me make some decisions on whether to stay in on a hand or not. And it even seemed to work for a while. The way I figure, if you can spend a night getting even a little bit better at your game then it’s all worth it!