Sickness and Suckouts

I am the suckout king!

Friday night was homegame night. I'd been looking forward to it for weeks.

Thus it was somewhat unfortunate that I had to take Thursday off work, through finally succumbing to the bug that's been ailing me for the last week or so. I just finally ran out of energy.

Like one of those little bunnies in the Duracell advert, I abruptly ground to a halt.

A lazy day in bed left me feeling better, but unfortunately the little one has been continuing to suffer too, and by Friday she sounded like a 70-year old man after a lifetime of 40 cigarettes a day.

With her temperature in the high fever range, I called in a holiday and took the day off to help Mrs Div keep a close watch on her.

By the evening her temperature had declined, so I didn't feel too guilty about heading out to play poker.

I was running quite late, and missed the first game.

Before departing I did contemplate 'doing a Hellmuth' and calling the guys to tell them to post and fold for me until I arrived, but decided against it. I was still pretty run down, so didn't see the point in rushing along only to bring my D-game to the table.

Of course I told the guys I was just being sporting and giving someone else a chance to win a game.

By the time we were ready for game two, I'd had the chance to down a few beers and wind down.

We were six handed for a £10 buy-in NLH game, with one newcomer to the group. Allan was later to suffer one of my outdraws.

We tend to play pretty deep stacks and a slow clock, so the structure suits me. I'm not so used to playing short handed, as online I almost exclusively play ten handed cash games.

Adopting my starting hand standards for different game types is one aspect of my play I've been working on.

Consequently as the night went on, and the blinds increased, I found myself in a few marginal situations, all but one of which went my way.

Allan went down when my KQ beat out his AT when I made a pair on the flop.

Now in possession of a big stack, I started to try some selective bullying, which went wrong when a big raise with QT was reraised all-in by short-stack Pat (previously christened Party Poker Pat by me, after an outrageous outdraw run).

He didn't have enough chips to push me off the hand, and my gut feel was I was up against an underpair, so the call was easy.

Doh! How wrong could I be? He had AQ, and I was in a bad spot. Until that is, a T hit the board, and sent Pat to the rail.

He took it well, but I'm banned from using the Party Poker Pat nickname now.

Ultimately I was heads up with Steph, and had him comfortably outchipped. Steph is a tough opponent and much more a SNG and tourney specialist than me, so I didn't want to let him back in by giving him any cheap double throughs.

He survived one sticky situation with a rivered straight, but when I flopped top pair against his flush draw, the chips went in and no flush card emerged.

Over the night I don't think I laid an outrageous bad beat on anyone, but I certainly carried some luck.

Perhaps my newly commissioned card protector can take the credit.

One of Mrs Div's new friends from the breast feeding support group runs a franchise for producing casts or imprints of kids hands and feet.

Hence my new card protector is a cast of a 2-month old babies fist. Pretty cool I thought...