Tinfoil hat time

I had a new podcast of Fighting Talk to listen to last night, so I was able to play a regular single table SNG (if you don't think that's a non sequitur then you spend far too much time reading this blog).

I saw my first ace (don't even talk to me about pairs, or suited connectors) when the blinds were at 75/150, and my stack was down to about 900. There were six players left at the table. Flushed with excitement, I pushed A9o from late position, got called by KQ and doubled up. Then it was back to card dead city for a while.

Fortunately, on the bubble, I got a little rush of reasonable hands and connecting flops, with the result that when we reached the money, I was actually chip leader (which just goes to show, that the primary requirement for success in non-turbo SNG's is patience -- it helped that it was a really good episode of Fighting Talk, which, at this point, was winding down). I lost a couple of 60/40's, so when we reached heads up I was actually slightly behind.

I thought I had been card dead before? No worries, the dealer proved to me it could get worse (I don't know how many times I saw J4 off). Fortunately, my opponent was very passive, so I was usually able to escape for, at worst, the loss of the BB. He invariably limped from the SB. Unfortunately, he caught on to my card deadness and started calling everything. I had to resort to running big bluffs with hands like 62o on an AQ9 flop.

But I was confident ... I still had about 40% of the chips in play, and felt that with any big hand I'd likely be able to double up. After 50 hands heads up, I got AA in the big blind.

And he folded preflop.