Magic words: ‘Good call’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/06/2010 (5706 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This trip to Vegas has been an interesting one, to say the least. I’ve played mainly cash games the entire time but that was my plan from the start. The one tournament that I did play, however, allowed me to play with Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth and two former Nov. 9 finalists in Scott Montgomery and Jeff Schulman — not exactly the type of table draws you would expect from a $1,500 no-limit event.

I’ve also played with some good players in the cash games — or at least some famous ones. Jamie Gold and a few of us started a 10-20 no-limit game at the Venetian and might I say my buddy, Travis Brown, stacked him for about $3,000. Well done, Travis, it has to feel good to stack a former WSOP champion! As I mentioned last week, I played with Phil Laak when he broke the record for longest continuous poker game, and I also played with someone I feel is in the top five players in the world in Kenny Tran.

Every poker trip throughout my career tends to be made up by a handful of hands that, if they go my way, lead to me having a successful trip; if they don’t it usually means I end up losing money. This time was no exception as I lost more than my share of coolers. I ran KK into AA twice and KK into AK and lost that hand for over seven grand. In the end, however, I’m not disappointed with the way I played and although I ended up a small loser on the trip, I really should have lost a heck of a lot more.

The most interesting hand I played out there was at the Bellagio against a solid regular whom I had played with for about 60 hours when this hand came up.

I raised an unopened pot from middle position with 99; one player called and then the solid regular three-bet me from the button. I called to see a flop since we both had over $10,000 behind us and the other player in the hand folded pre-flop. The flop was 852 rainbow and I checked. He bet $560 and I called. The turn brought a 3 and again I checked. Now, this is where the hand got interesting. After I checked, I watched as he went and grabbed a stack of black chips (20 $100 chips). He shuffled them and cut out $1,700 pretty quickly, he shuffled them again and again and eventually bet $1,060. I was pretty confident I had the best hand, so I had a few things to consider. I could raise and take down the pot right there but I really felt like he was going to bluff the river so I decided to flat-call his turn bet. The river was a jack, which didn’t really change anything since I felt like he was holding AK. Again I checked, trying to induce him into firing a third barrel.

My friend, Travis, was playing at the same table as I was during the time this hand was being played and before I even began to play this pot we had decided to call it a night as it was about 3 a.m. and we were both starving. We had decided to go to Chinatown to a great 24-hour Vietnamese restaurant. This was going to be our last hand of the night, but there was a good chance I was about to lose my appetite.

My opponent fired a bet of $2,800 on the river and the final board was 8523J. By the way he is playing his hand, I figured he was trying to represent aces, but with the way he bet the turn and the way he was acting on the river, I had to go with my gut and make the call. So I did and as I looked up at him, he said the best thing any poker player can hear, “good call,” and mucked his hand.

After I raked in the pot of almost $10,000, I racked up my chips and took Travis out for dinner. After all that, you can imagine I didn’t lose my appetite after all!