MacArthur, But Defeated
Hokay. I'm back and ready to start cracking the metaphorical pads again. One last poker dalliance before we return to your regularly scheduled programming:
- Technically neither hand was a bad beat since when the money when in I was the one drawing to two outs. Had I won either hand I would have been the deliverer of said bad beat. The technical term for what happened to me was getting "cold decked" -- I was given hands that given the run of play to that point thus far (and the sad size of my twinkly little stack on the last hand) were nigh-impossible to get away from. Any (good) player in my situation would have gone home the instant that K77 flop came.
- Overall I was happy with my play. The two mistakes on day one were harmful, but neither was deadly and on day two I was very sharp. It takes a lot of luck to get to where I did but there's skill, too. I didn't win any massive pots but moved my stack from 15k to 60k by methodically chopping out blinds, re-raising preflop with marginal hands, and feigning weakness to my advantage. I got some sense for how someone like Ivey or Ferguson can negotiate those minefields as proficiently as they do.
- To those wondering whether Annie Duke is hittable: er... maybe. I'm sure she cleans up real nice, but at the table she had her game face on. She's very much the table cop and kept talking about her kid, her boyfriend, and her kid's dead snake, so hittability-ponderings were kept to a minimum.
- The WSOP is probably the only event on the planet where there are massive lines outside the men's bathroom but not the women's.
- You're damn right I'm going to try to qualify again next year.