Page 10 - September 2006 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Jim Mercurio: Poker
Jim’s World Series of Poker® Adventure LWinning Big Pots (Part 2 of 2)
ast issue, I detailed a hand where I cracked Kathy Liebert’s aces and sent her to the rail in the rst ve minutes of the World Series of Poker® (WSOP) Event #2. ere is a saying in poker that you win small pots and lose big pots with aces. To nd out whether it’s true
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Page 10
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
September 2006
or not, keep reading.
My friend Michael, from my weekly home game, who came to watch and support me, told me he used to think he was a better player than me, but now he realizes that I can do things he can’t at the table. I even overheard him tell his wife how he was amazed that I threw away pocket jacks pre- op to a raise and a reraise.
Blinds were $100–$200. I had a nice stack of about $8,000. From middle position, I made a standard three- times the big blind raise with TJ. e button mini- raised (making the smallest raise possible) to $1,200. I wasn’t excited about playing a big pot heads-up with TJ, but I liked the 3.5:1 pot odds. More importantly, I was playing aggressively and if I let the table see me lay down a hand to a small raise, they were going to run over me.
Flop came 8TJ rainbow. I checked, thinking I was trapping. However, my opponent surprised me by going all in with his $6,000 stack—a huge overbet of the pot.
Who was trapping who? If I lost, I would have a few chips
left, but this call would be my tournament life. If I folded,
I would still have plenty of chips. e only thing I was
really worried about was a set: pocket 8’s, tens or jacks.
I was leaning toward folding, but I took some time to think. I knew that his chances of holding tens or jacks in his hand were 40% less since I held one of each. Plus, the bet seemed to say,“I don’t want a caller.” Even if he had a set of 8’s, I had an almost ten percent chance to redraw. However, the most peculiar evidence was his mini-raise. You might make a big raise with 8’s or jacks to end the hand, but you don’t want to open yourself up to a reraise where you have to fold. So who opens it up for a reraise and wants a caller? Aces or kings.
is thought process took a minute or so, so I told the players to call a clock on me.
I had sixty seconds to act.
With aces or kings, he still had about a 22% chance, but was I here to play or not? As the oor man was counting down my last ten seconds, I said,“I think you have aces.” I called. He turned over aces. My two pair held up.
Shortly after the dinner break, I worked my way up to 30k, two-three times the average stack. A run of bad cards and a bad beat (5-outer) knocked my chip stack down to average. Losing chips wasn’t as bad as losing my
status as table captain. Others saw that I could be beat. For the rst six hours, I don’t even know if I called a hand and lost. I was either betting or getting out of the way.
Ten to eleven hours into the tournament, we were down to 300—just 30 out of the money. I had imagined that I would be the big stack, bullying desperate short- stacks. But my stack had dwindled. However, I did manage to squeak into the money.
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Poker: Wired Aces and River Rats