It Ain't Over...

I was playing some 1/2 recently at the Venetian and had a hand that really stuck with me. It was a fairly standard table, mostly tourists, only a couple players I was really watching to make strong plays. The woman to my right in the 2 seat was there with her husband in the 9 seat. They were both fairly pleasant people and pretty awful poker players. Nice people though.

At any rate, I was seeing a lot of trash hands, when finally I got dealt pocket kings. I was under the gun, bumped it up to $10, and got two callers, one of whom was the woman from above in the big blind.

Flop came down all low, pretty spread out, two spades. Woman checks, I bet $25, other guy folds, she calls. Turn puts a 2nd heart on the board. She checks, I bet $60, she calls. She has about $80 more behind, so my intention was to price her in.

At this point, I'm thinking that she maybe has two spades and is looking for the flush, maybe has a piece of it with a strong kicker (which I'm putting on an ace since I'm holding two kings), or maybe just a hand like AQ that she won't lay down. Terrible ways to play all those hands, but like I said, she wasn't the strongest poker player. Basically, I'm sitting there thinking "No ace, no spade, no ace, no spade, no ace, no spade."

Obviously the ace of spades falls on the river.

To complicate matters further, she goes into the tank. At first I'm thinking she's really considering her play, but then it goes so long that I start thinking she must be Hollywooding it. Then she goes so long that I decide she can't possibly be Hollywooding because nobody would believe such a drawn out act. (Incidentally, that's part of why I never call time on somebody. They reveal information by how long they think, so why stop them from doing so?)

Eventually she pushes all in, and despite my strong desire to call, I'm pretty sure I have to fold. Cowboys just aren't much of a hand on the river with an ace on the board, especially when any hand I'd put her on earlier would have beaten me.

I still have one play left to me though. It almost never works, but I decided to give it a shot. While analyzing her face for any reaction, I flip over my hand.

Turns out I didn't have to analyze too hard, because she pickes up her cards between her index and middle fingers and makes to toss them away. While with a craftier player it could have been a ruse, there was just about zero chance of that with her. The dealer stops her from actually mucking her cards as I hadn't called yet, but it didn't really matter; the damage was done for her. I called, and she mucked without showing.

A $360 pot is a pretty good sized one in a 1/2 game, and was huge at that table. It made the whole session for me, and ended hers.

When the ace of spades came down and she pushed, I figured I was pretty done for. She totally threw the pot by reacting to my prompt the way she did. If I hadn't realized, or she had, that the hand wasn't over yet, she'd have won.