Frack Me? Frack You!

March 2, 2009

When I want to play poker lately but don’t want to sit at the cash tables, I’ll pull up a pot limit Omaha sit and go. I like the Matrix tourneys on Full Tilt since I get to play four tables at once. I also enjoy the heads-up matches. At the lowest buy-ins, which is where I’m spending my time learning PLO, the players are about as poor as I’ve found at any level of any game online in the last five years; they’re exceedingly easy to read and willing to call off their stacks on second-best draws and the occasional lone pair.

My favorite game against these players is the four-player heads-up shootout, in which one player gets everyone else’s money for winning back to back matches. It’s a nice ROI for beating two single players, and given the skill level (slim to none) and temperament (raging infant) of the average opponent I figure my chances have to be pretty good. And it seems like they are – I’m showing a small profit on all my HU matches so far, and in more than a few of them where I’m not winning I’m getting my money in well ahead.

I played one this afternoon to kill some time while waiting to do an interview. In my first match it takes me all of about three hands to figure out that my opponent is the sort who won’t call a bet without something approaching the nuts. That’s bad news for him; I grind him down and finish him off to get to my second opponent. Within the same three-hand window I determine that this fellow is the exact opposite of the last guy: he’ll fire out pot every time it’s checked to him. The best way to play a guy like this is to let him do all the work, so I make that my game plan.

On the fourth hand of our match I limp on the button with Kc-Qc-9s-7c and flop queens full of sevens; he bets pot, and I take it down with a reraise. He pauses for a moment before folding. I’m pretty sure he thinks I was just making a play at him, but he happened to have complete air this time around and hadn’t seen me get aggressive yet.

Two hands later I limp on the button with Ad-Jd-8c-5c and call his raise, only to flop a full house again. It’s an underfull this time, eights full of jacks, so I’m more vulnerable than before. But when he bets pot again I have no good reason to think I’m behind, so I reraise pot myself. He thinks for a good bit and then makes the call. The turn completes a harmless straight draw, which I hope he’s been drawing at; he checks and I move all-in, since the pot is just a little greater than my stack.

dumbass, he types in the chat window, obviously convinced that I’ve decided to try to out-aggress him regardless of my cards since he thinks that’s what I did to him the first time around. And he keeps thinking. Normally I don’t say anything to my opponents other than the occasional nh, but this time I know I’m way ahead and I really want him to call. So I type, just fold.

It’s not three seconds before he calls with Qh-Qd-3d-3c for nothing more than a bare pair of queens, leaving himself only 80 of his 3,000 starting chips behind. Then he spikes another Q on the river for the bigger full house, quickly types frack you, and takes all the mobneys.

The good news:

1. I keep getting my money in good
2. I’m showing enough profit in the cash games that my results in these little diversions are irrelevant
3. Without saying anything to provoke them, I have the dumbasses calling me “dumbass”

Speaking of fun in chat boxes, I saw my favorite English-as-a-second-language online poker of the moment this afternoon when I sat at a full ring PLO game. A player from Indonesia was running over the table by raising pot preflop and then betting pot any time the action checked to him. Another player, this one American, didn’t seem to care for the Indonesian’s strategy and decided to play sheriff.

After doubling up once, the American got his whole stack in the middle on the flop in a later pot, putting his Indonesian friend to the test. The Indonesian’s response: type i suck you in the chat box and make the call with no pair and a backdoor flush draw. (He didn’t get there.) I think I know what he meant…and I’m pretty sure he’d have been surprised if the American had felt like taking him up on his offer.

The post Frack Me? Frack You! by Jason Kirk, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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