Bad Beat

No poker blog is complete without bad beat stories. So here's one...

I was playing in a qualifier for an online WSOP satellite. It was a single table tournament, and the winner would get a seat in a WSOP satellite. Then the satellite would award a seat in the WSOP main event to the winners, 1 seat for every 30 players or so.

Single table tournaments on PartyPoker always take about 1 hour.

Despite not getting any decent cards (the only pocket pairs I had the entire tournament were 55 and 33 and I never even had AK), I managed to build up a nice stack by playing tight (well, I had no choice) and hitting some flops. Here's a description of when things started to go bad:

This hand occurred when we had three players left. Porkchop goes all-in, I call with AcQd. He's got 5s3s. I flop top pair, he flops two pair and rivers a boat.

A couple hands later, I eliminate the other player. Now I'm heads-up with Porkchop and I'm up 6490 to 1510. Here are the remaining hands:

I go all-in with 33. Porkchop calls with KJd. A jack flops and he wins.

Porkchop folds preflop.

I fold preflop.

Porkchop raises all-in and I call. I have AsQd, he has 7d4d. I flop top pair but he turns two pair and rivers a full house.

I fold preflop.

Porkchop folds preflop.

I fold preflop.

I don't have a lot of chips left and go all-in with Jh7d. It's not so bad when I see that he has 9s5s (of course, I should be very scared when *this* guy had suited little cards. And wouldn't you know it, he flops a pair of 5s and makes trips on the turn. I lose.

In those four showdowns, I was the favorite every time. The odds of Porkchop winning all four of those showdowns were about 3%. Now, this is exactly how you want your opponents to play. You should be so lucky to always get all your money in there when you are the favorite! But sometimes it's tough to take a beating like that.

- schneid