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Many
of the key hands, and all of the biggest pots from my World Poker Tour Championship
experience are described in my book, The Making of a Poker Player. But there
are so many hands that go by over the course of a tournament that I didn’t
dare try to cover them all. Sometimes the seemingly insignificant hands
are actually the hands that separate strong tournament players from weaker
ones. The hand I’m about to describe, however, seemed pretty significant
right when it happened. And you won’t find it in my book. On Day Four of the event, with just two tables remaining, I hit a river card against Ricky Grijalva to give me a T2.4 million pot, and keep me in the tournament in a big way. (There were only about T17 million chips in the entire tournament.) On the very next hand, as I was still shakily trying to stack all the chips, Frenchman Patrick Bruel limped UTG for T30,000, and I, next to act, looked down at two queens. “Raise,” I said, making the bet T130,000 to go. T.J. Cloutier, a well-known tournament player and poker author sitting to my immediate left, raised T250,000 more to T380,000. Everyone folded back to me, including Patrick, and I was left alone with T.J. T.J. had about as many chips as I did going into the hand. We were two of the biggest stacks at the table, if not the two biggest. I was faced with the most important decision of my life against a poker legend.
The flop came king-high and I checked. T.J. instantly waved his hands at the pot, saying “I’m all-in.” “I fold, T.J.,” I said, showing him my queens. I almost never show my hand, but I thought by doing so I might get him to show his, and that it might allow me to represent a big hand sometime later in the tournament. After all, if I flat call raises preflop with QQ, what do I reraise with? As I showed T.J. my hand, he did in fact show me his. Two red aces. I think a lot of players, perhaps most players, would’ve gone broke on this hand. I didn’t. Not only that, I was able to reraise T.J. in a later pot and get him to lay down a better hand than mine. Instead of winning “only” $83,165 for fourteenth place, I ended up winning $706,903 for third. Sometimes the hands you throw away are goldmines. |
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Copyright
© 2004-2005 by Matt Matros | All Rights Reserved |
