Page 13 - August 2008 • Southern California Gaming Guide

Jim Mercurio: Poker
TSomething Wicked This Way Comes
here is something that keeps me up at nights. It makes me have nightmares. And when I see it in real life, I crumble into a crying heap of poker wimpness. What is it?
It’s a board like 7T4 with two cards of the same suit. Why is that so scary? Because if you are ahead, what card could come that would make you happy? An o suit deuce? Basically, any card that comes eviscerates you like Jason in Friday, the 13th.
Imagine that you have KK and you make a continuation bet on this board and get three callers.
e horror! And, for fun, let’s say pre- op, players only call with pocket pairs, suited connectors and Axs. And assume they call the op bet only with the nut ush draw, a pair/ ush draw, open-ended straight draw or double-gutshot, overpair or AT (top-pair, top-kicker, TPTK). So here are some of
the hands that stick around after the op: A4s, 56, 89, 68, AJs, JJ, QQ.
What are the safe cards to fall with this board where the seven and ten are both spades?
All spades are gone, right? Aces are gone because Axs (and beyond our assumptions, AK also) could be out there. Red King is good. We eliminated TQ from the calling range, but QQ is a possibility, albeit slight. Is a Jack good? Nope, 89 just hit the nuts and JJ gets some help. Ten? TPTK just made trips. 9? 68 double-gutshot just got there. 8 lets 56 get there. 7 is safe, it it’s not a spade. 6 and 5 screw you because they
complete 89 and 68, respectively. A 4 helps out A4s, 34s and 45s. And, of course, some of the twos are safe. What a nightmare.
So, we like non-spade King (1), non-spade 7 (3) and non-spade deuce (3). So out of 47 cards, 7 of
them will let you retain the lead if you are already ahead. So 85% of the deck is a scare card that could give someone a Freddy Krueger, Frankenstein or Michael Myers from Halloween fame: a monster.
If you ever watched Phil Hellmuth bet out one seventh of the pot in a tricky attempt to shut out two overcards (2 outs) from drawing out, don’t emulate that on this board. is is no time to make a small bet if you are going to put money in the pot later in the hand. If you knew you were going to go down in ames with it, you might even consider a huge overbet or an all in. If I had a set in a multi-way eld here, I would be thinking huge overbet or check- raise all in. ere are just too many bloodbath cards that can come on the turn.
ink about a board like K72 rainbow. If you have aces and you are ahead on the op and you are heads up, what are the maximum number of outs an opponent can have to out draw you. If he has a pair,witha78orKQ,thenhehas5outs.Ifhehasa pocket pair, then he has two outs to hit his set. So if you are ahead now, there is 90-95% chance you will be ahead on the turn. Here is where a less than pot- sized bet makes a lot more sense. You are way ahead or way behind since you can’t name many playable
hands—AK, 22, 77, KK, AA—that at would play a huge pot here that you can beat.
e moral of the story is. Do you want to lure your opponent into a trap or do you want to scare him and his spirits away? Figure it out and act accordingly. Unless you want your bankroll to die like a salacious couple in a hot tub in a slasher lm, make sure you make your bets the right size.
You can buy Jim’s lm Hard Scrambled at www.hardscrambled.com or if you like his column, contact him at jim@jamespmercurio.com.
Gaming News (Continued)
Final Table Set for Historic 2008 World Series of Poker® Main Event
Continued from page 10...
largest stage—inside the Rio’s state-of-the-art, 1,500-seat Penn & Teller Theater. The nine finalists, mostly unknown amateur poker players and little- known professionals, will return to their respective
lives until the second week of November, when the eventual champion claims a
$9.1 million payday.
At that time, the players, five Americans (including two
Southern Californians), two Canadians, a Russian and
a Dane, are free to secure sponsors and promote themselves. They can also
better their poker skills by engaging a coach, studying
their play as it is televised over
the summer and fall by ESPN, and play in some additional low-level poker tournaments and events.
In descending order of chip count, e November Nine are Dennis Phillips, 53, from St.
Louis, Missouri, with 26,295,000 chips; Ivan Demidov, 27, from Moscow, Russia, with 24,400,000 chips; Scott Montgomery, 26, from Perth, Ontario, Canada, with 19,690,000 chips; Peter Eastgate, 22, from
Odense, Denmark, with 18,375,000 chips; Ylon Schwartz, 38, from Brooklyn, New York, with 12,525,000 chips;
Darus Suharto, 39, from Toronto, Ontario, Canada,
with 12,520,000 chips; David Rheem, 28, from Los Angeles, California, with 10,230,000 chips; Craig Marquis, 23, from Arlington, Texas,
with 10,210,000 chips;
and Kelly Kim, 31, from Whittier, California, with
2,620,000 chips.
e nine will play down
to two on November 9th and the nal two competitors will then go
heads up beginning at 10 p.m. pdt on November 10th,
with the winner expected to be crowned in the early morning hours of November 11th. In a World Series of Poker rst, ESPN will carry same-day coverage of the victory beginning at 9 p.m. est on November 11th.
e November Nine outlasted a massive eld of 6,844 who entered the $10,000 No-Limit Texas Hold’em World Championship. is year’s total Main Event prize pool is $64,333,600. A total of 666 players will cash in the event; payout for 666th place was $21,230.
e 39th annual World Series of Poker was the largest and richest in history, attracting 58,720 competitors in its 55 events—an increase of 4,432, or 8 percent, over the previous record established in 2007. e total prize pool at this year’s World Series of Poker was $180,676,248, an increase of $20,880,030 over the previous record, also established last year. Players from a record 118 countries participated in this year’s tournaments, more than in the most recent
Winter Olympics. at number is up 36 percent from the previous record of 87 countries set in 2007.
...Gaming News Continues on Page 16
AUGUST 2008
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
Page 13
Poker: Wired Aces and River Rats Gaming News (Continued)