June 10th - £20+£2 Pot Limit Hold'Em - Grosvenor (Luton)

When you take on board as many 6/4 shots as I did in this evenings £20 Pot Limit game in Luton you're bound to come up short once or twice as to the outcome. It just so happened that the time I DID miss my flush draw it was for almost all of my chips!

With only 1000 points for your 20 notes you have to try and go easy. Pot limit is a much easier game to control than No Limit as, in the the early - mid stages in particular, you'll nearly always get to see a flop before committing away all your chip count.

I plodded along picking up a pot here and a pot there and despite having two buy ins I get to the break with circa 9k in chips which was pretty good. After all the rebuys & top-ups there was a prize pool of £2660 (133000 chips in play) and I was sitting happlily on a nice stack.

This got much bigger thanks to a fluke of a hand. In the 200-400 blinds with 3d-4d three of us see the flop of 2d-6d-9c. Now with my hand I ain't going anywhere so I bet out first only to be re-raised across the table for all my opponents chips...some 3000. Of course I call and he flips the Jd-Qd (nice hand) which then looks a big favourite for the pot once the 7d falls on the turn. I'm just about to whizz my hand away when he says...'Hang on a mo. Much as though I dislike to say this you still have an out which knowing my luck right now will almost certainly appear'.

Of course he was talking about the 5d which would give me the straight flush. He burned...and turned (as he was the one dealing) and out popped the 5d! Gasps all round!

With two tables left I have 18k in chips and am looking well in for another final table appearence until THIS hand....

Again, in EP, I get the Ac-6c and with blinds at 300-600 three of us see a flop of 3c-Kc-7h. Nut flush draw for me. I check. To my left there's a bet of 2k. The other player folds and I flat call. The Ah falls on the turn.

Now given that the 2k bet came straight away I immediately thought the bettor held something like K-Q / K-J / K-10. He hadn't raised pre-flop so this kind of holding was very likely. I immediately bet 2k. 'Raise', came a voice, 'to 8k'!

This guy was the only player on our table who had a similar chip count to me...perhaps a few thousand less...so this was going to be a big pot. With top pair and nut-flush draw still there to be had I duly went 'all-in' for maximum benefit which my opponent called. He flipped 3-3!

So I needed a club. The 6s fell on the river and I was down to 4k. Even if I'd have just flat called the 6k extra I'd still have been hard pushed to get away from two pairs after the river so never mind!

My last few chips went in with Kd-9d versus A-Q. No help for me and I was out in 15th place!

Entries -> 36 - Place -> 15th - Loss -> £82 ($152) Profit/Loss for 2006 -> +$12718