18-seaters rule!

Oh hey, guess what? I won another 18-seater last night on PokerStars for a tidy $92 profit while watching CSI and Without a Trace. While watching this, I made the mistake of commenting out loud how cute Poppy Montgomery is. Naturally, Mrs. Commish immediately went on the commonly seen offensive-defensive female psychosis combination “You never used to talk like that, it really pisses me off” followed by the “You think I’m fat, don’t you?” Oddly, this helped my play by shifting my focus away from chatting up the wife and more to concentrating on the final table.

It took one fairly meaty suckout to get to the big prize, but it wasn’t a bad play suckout. I was shortstacked and out of the money with five left (3xBB = shortstacked). I was UTG and pushed all-in with QJs. It was raised by the button and the big blind called. I was hoping one would push the other off the hand, but no such luck. Flop of K9x gave me some hope for a gutshot. Button NOW pushes and BB calls again. Cards are flipped to show button with AA and BB with AK. Hmmm, not good. Turn is a Q, giving me some outs. River is a J and I tripled up, and the BB was teetering. I busted him and the other shortstack on the same hand a few minutes later when my 77 finds a 7 on the flop.

I agree with BadBlood that the heads-up play online is terrible. I find that most will fold their SB preflop without a fight, and fold their BB to a min raise. I always chip-up in these situations by keeping the pressure on, push push push. I’m always keeping an eye on the chip counts, because having the chip lead in H2H is huuuuuge. It’s fun betting half the guys stack, knowing that it puts him/her into a pot-committed situation. In fact, I probably pay as much attention to the relative sizes of the blinds and chip stacks as I do to my actualcards. Not sure that’s really smart, but it seems to be effective at this level.