Have you ever had this hand?

You know the hand. You finally get dealt some good cards - pocket Kings just when you need them. You are not yet down to the push it all in stage but it is getting close enough that you are thinking about it.

The pocket Kings come along so you make a big raise kind of hoping someone will call you - but scared that if they do they will still suck out. So you make your raise and someone comes over the top. You decide this is probably the best hand you are going to see anyway so you push all-in.

Of course they turn over pocket Aces.

Well tonight I was that guy. Not the one with the Kings - the one with the Aces. It was a nice feeling to see someone play into my Aces that way.

It was even a nicer feeling to see them actually stand up through the river and win the hand - that usually doesn't happen on Riverstars.

This was in one of the cheap ($2+0.20) tournaments - lots of players (>3000) and it is still going. If I go out now, I will win a grand total of $7.31.

When you really do't want to go all in

I haven't been playing that much - not like I used to but I wanted to post something about the hand I just played. I had to smile when it happened (because I have often been on the other side of this).

I am playing in a $10+1 180 person S&G at Pokerstars and getting some of the worse cards I have gotten in a while. I am usually a semi-loose fairly aggressive player but I was working on being the tightest player at the table. We were about 45 hands in and although our table had lost a couple players our table had been kept together since the start and I wasn't the only one playing tight.

Over a period of about 3 hands we lost a couple people and they were replaced with some fresh blood (I mean new players). Obviously they weren't used to such tight play because after about 4 hands one newbie complained "that this was the tightest table they had seen". I smiled.

The next hand I got dealt A10 suited. I was under the button and decided to min raise. As expected most folded but one of the short stacks pushed all-in. The guy in front of me decided to call and I, perhaps foolishly, decided to just call. The call was for just less than half my stack and since these were the best cards I had seen, I went with it.

It was clearly my hand as the flop came A10A. The guy in front of me decided it was his time to push. I smiled and called. The cards were revealed and the original all-in had pocket queens, the guy in front of me had pocket kings - they had me beat until the flop. The hand played out, I increased my stack by about 2.5 times and they broke our table up.

The last thing I saw in the chat box was the newbie saying "now that's more like it".

I smiled.