Amateur hour at the K of C.

I had played fairly conservatively up to that point in the tournament, keeping my head above water by not going to bat with questionable hands. My strategy had me up about $700 going into that hand – not strong, by any stretch, but solid.

I looked down at my hole cards and found a pair of 9s. I was in the big blind with three other callers – blinds were $100-$200 – and when the betting came back around to me, I decided that at a table of 6, a pair of 9s was pretty strong. I had hoped that I had garnered a reputation as a tight player at that point, and with three callers, I made a push for the pot by raising an additional $500, about a fifth of my remaining stack.

Two of the three previous callers fell out, which left the hand to me and the kid in the red shirt with the monster stack. Redshirt had played quite aggressively during these early rounds of the tournament, knocking out five or six other players, which accounted for the low numbers always present at our table – as soon as we’d get up to a full table of 9, Redshirt would just as quickly knock one or two of them out. At an earlier point, when he turned over an unsuited 9-6 and took a healthy pot, I had him pegged as a bluffer who would back down at the first show of strength, and stole several pots from him in the process.

Redshirt called my $500 and we went to the flop.

You can’t throw a dead cat at the TV these days without hitting a televised poker tournament; even The Travel Channel is in on poker, airing about 12 hours of poker a week under the pretense of showing viewers the exotic locales at which some of the tournaments are played. (See beautiful Tunica, Mississippi!) No longer the province of hardened gamblers and problem-gamblers-to-be in frat houses on college campuses across the country, poker has moved out of the shadows and smoke-filled back rooms into a place of near-respectability, where housewives, businessman, gamers and factory workers alike are getting a piece of the action.

A good three years after the boom started with Chris Moneymaker’s shocking win at the 2003 World Series of Poker, it may have slowed a little bit (though I don’t have any empirical evidence stating such), but to these eyes, it shows no signs of dying as of yet. Poker’s got a democratizing appeal: anyone with the green to lay down can buy in and play alongside the professionals - I defy you to walk into the main offices of the St. Louis Cardinals, plunk down a large amount of cash and demand to play alongside Albert Pujols. The only other game/sport that comes close to welcoming all comers is auto racing, but you’d need to bring a lot more in the way of cash or sponsorship to the table, and besides, poker relies on another great equalizer that doesn’t really exist for ride-buyers in racing: luck. Lady Luck doesn’t care if you’re Phil Hellmuth or Bramble Tamble; sometimes she smiles upon you, and even though there’s a requisite amount of skill also involved in being successful at the game, all of the skill in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t get the cards.

With poker’s explosion comes events like the one that was held this past weekend at a local K of C, in conjunction with the town’s summer festival. (“I’ll see your three drumsticks and raise you a bucket of wings.” No, silly – K of C, not KFC.) It’s not likely that it would have drawn half the participants it eventually had (38) if poker was still taboo, but all were willing to put down $40 in the hope of walking away with over $500. And it was definitely amateur hour (our story’s protagonist included) - the woman who had sat down next to me was all, “I don’t know what I’m doing!” before we’d started. I had her figured for a shark, feigning weakness and exuding femininity in order to eat some of us suckers alive, but it was true … she really didn’t know what she was doing. It was an adventure, bless her heart.

Which brings us to our hero and his nemesis Redshirt.

I had played pretty tight throughout, and while my stack wasn’t enough to do damage had I advanced farther in the tournament, I think I was building a reputation as a solid player who didn’t take chances. (Or maybe not; sometimes we are not as we perceive we are.) The one person who had challenged me to that point when I had gone all-in fell to my pair of queens.

Redshirt, on the other hand, was a very loose, aggressive player. When he flipped the aforementioned 9-6 earlier, afterwards I felt like given the opportunity, I would push on him, and he’d back down.

I thought my 9s were strong, but Redshirt called my $500 bet and we saw the flop. A-K-3, unsuited. Rats. Two overcards.

I checked to Redshirt, and he bet $1000. I thought it over, considered his previous track record of bullying people out of pots with his large stack, considered the fact that I had more than a fifth of my chips in the pot, and went all in for my remaining $2000. He called and flipped his cards – A-7.

Rats again.

The turn and the river did me no good, and I was eliminated in roughly 24th place. 24th place paid $0.

In retrospect, I think I had lost patience. There’s always another hand, you know, but I was too in love with my pocket pair to back out of the hand. And I thought I could eat into his chip stack somewhat and put him in his place. Lesson learned.

Redshirt ended up winning the tournament, by the way. He had garnered such a massive chip stack that no one else at the final table was in a position to do anything about it, especially with blinds at $800-$1600 by that point. But the open bar at the K of C eased the pain I felt about my dumb play with 9s.