Update

Update on what's happening. I'm excited to talk about what just happened in a poker tournament I joined. However, poker isn't the only thing that been happening. Perhaps more significant than any other right now is I'm thinking of moving to California in the next few weeks. I haven't made my decision yet. And I might have to talk about it in more details in some post in the future.

Anyway, on to the tournament. Four hundred eighty nine players this time. I finished 6th. I outlasted 483 other players! Woohoo! It was an awesome ride and it is my best poker experience so far.

For a long time, I was actually the chip leader. In the tournament, people start out with 1500 chips. When I joined, I just told myself to be aggressive and put the decision on other people. I wasn't expecting to last beyond 30 minutes of playing, I just wanted to have fun. When I got to 20,000 in chips, I was just curious as to how much the chip leader had. I usually look at it as a gauge on how well I am doing.

And zing! The chip leader had 20,000! It was me! :O

I pretty much stayed as the chip leader until I reached 60,000. Then I got some hit. I went down to 54,000 and went down to like 10th place in the leaderboard. After some time, I got into two big pots (one of which is the hand that I'll tell you about) that catapulted me into a huge chip leader.

How big a chip leader was I? Massive. For a time, I had 130,000 to my stack, and the 2nd place guy is 52,000. I was more than twice the next guy. And it's fun playing the big stack. You get to bully people out of pots and that helped me a lot to accumulate more chips.

Anyway, this is one of the critical hands in the tournament. If I lose, I'll get a huge hit, if I win, I'll distance myself further from the rest.

Here's how it went down. I had and raised as is my SOP. I've been raising my hand a lot of times that I hope people won't think I have a monster when I actually have like in this hand. One guy called. The pot was approximately 5,000

The flop was something like:



The guy lead on and bet a healthy bet of another 4,000. At this point, I thought about raising him to see if indeed he has the king. It's the only card that can beat me. But I just called thinking I could re-raise on the turn (the 4th card is called the turn).

The turn gave another king. A King of clubs to be precise. So the board now looks like:



My opponent then bet something like 9,000.

At this point I was even less inclined to believe that my opponent has kings. It's just a law of probability, if there are more kings on the board, there are less kings anywhere else. So I was thinking my opponent probably hit the 3 or 5 or has a pocket pair. He's trying to represent he has kings by betting here with the fact that there's 2nd king on the board.

However, my initial plan of re-raising him on the turn had to change. His 9,000 bet was pretty high for me. Poker rules state I can only re-raise by at least twice that and I wasn't prepared to part ways with 18,000 to someone with 3 kings. I could have folded here and cut my losses, but the fact that there are 3 clubs already and I have a Jack of clubs, could give me some additional help. (i.e., I need 5 clubs to get a flush.)

So I just called.

The river (5th card) came 9c. And the board now looked like:



At this point, my opponent went all in for more than 30,000-35,000 of his remaining chips. Yikes!

Ok, I have to think this through and figure out if I'm ahead or not. If I'm not, I can still walk away and fold. And even though I lost a significant part of my chip stack, it's not game breaking. I think I started with around 55,000 chips and I still had around 40,000 if I walk away.

This is the hand that I took a long time contemplating. I had to answer 3 questions. Depending on how I answer these questions would determine whether I'll fold or call.

(1) Did he really have the king? At the turn, like I said, I was inclined to not believe he had the king. After reviewing what has happened though, I was 98% sure he _HAD_ the king.

Now, 3 kings would not beat a flush. So I had to dig deeper and two more questions needed to be answered. A hand that can beat me is a higher flush. With 4 clubs on the board, it's so easy to make a flush if you have one in your hand. But the question is:

(2) Did he flop a higher flush? He could be playing a king with an kicker of Ace of clubs. If that's the case, then he'll have a higher flush than my J-high. But I figured if he had AK pre-flop he would have been a lot more aggressive pre-flop. So I'm inclined to believe he didn't have the ace of clubs and that he didn't have a higher flush.

Note that at this point nothing is certain. I could still be wrong in my read. Right now, I'm looking at the "percentage" he could have the Ace of club. After revisiting how he played this hand, my gut is telling me it's probably not the case.

(3) Could he be playing K9 and got a full house? I figured it's possible, but I have a feeling that's not what he has. The main reason is that K9 is pretty weak, compared to say KJ or KQ or even AK. I made a healthy raised pre-flop and people don't usually call with K9.

After answering these 3 questions, I was confident that more than 50%, my Jack high flush is the better hand.

I called. He did indeed have the king. He had no clubs, his kicker wasn't 9 and I became ~50,000 richer.