An Enjoyable Bust-Out Hand

My wife, Marianna, doesn't play poker. Every time we go to Las Vegas, she thinks about playing a few hands of low-limit hold'em. She claims she can stand behind me and predict what I'm going to do a large proportion of the time, so I'm guessing she'd be pretty good for a beginner. She claims she can tell what the other players are thinking, and I suspect she's right. She has even mastered numerous key poker phrases, like "ship it, baby," and "nice hand, sir" (we're still working on "double belly buster"). Still, when it comes to actually putting her name on a list and buying in, she's never been able to pull the trigger. Live poker is just a little bit intimidating to nonplayers, even some who have spent lots of time wandering through cardrooms.

I don't live anywhere near Las Vegas, and when we visit, it tends to be more of a vacation, not a poker trip. Poker is just a safety net to make sure I don't accidentally get some sleep. But Marianna has things she enjoys doing in Las Vegas that don't particularly involve me, either (for example, spa services, getting a little sun, and shopping), and it's nice to spend some time in the poker room while she's off enjoying herself. On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I spent a bit of time in the Mirage poker room, a place I've always enjoyed. The Mirage runs daily tournaments, and often runs satellites in the afternoon. Even for their $60 events, they'll run winner-take-all satellites, $15 a seat (for hold'em), in which the winner gets an entry and cash.

As I've written before, I really like the single-table freezeout format. It unquestionably has some issues from a cardroom management perspective that make it unlikely to take over much real estate from ring games, but as a customer and a confessed satellite junkie I like it a lot. It also has a lot to offer poker novices. There's a strict guarantee about how much money you can lose. There's a reasonable chance of a big win. It provides a bite-sized bit of poker action that has a definite beginning, middle, and end. And unlike the ring-game format, it's almost guaranteed to provide some kind of excitement in a short period of time. By the time an hour and a half is up, either you've won or you've pushed all of your chips in - at least once.

This brings me back to the Mirage. On our recent trip, I played a few of these satellites whenever the opportunity arose. Luckily, I didn't fall into the tournament player's trap (devoting long hours only to leave empty-handed). In my first three, I saw a total of seven hands: A-K three times in one, K-K once in each of the other two, and two less interesting hands. It's hard to get too upset with only $25 at risk. After my third rapid exit, I loitered around the cardroom to see if another satellite would form. Only an hour remained before the event, but a list was developing rapidly. As luck would have it, we were only one name short when my wife wandered into the room.

I'm proud to say that our marriage is strong enough to withstand what happened next. Over Marianna's strenuous objections, we placed her name on the list, and with just short of an hour to go, the satellite formed. The "we" included my friend Paul, who had joined us that day, and without whose help I don't think I would have been able to talk her into it. We dragged her over to the table, bought her in, and gave her what will probably stand forever as the most confusing poker advice ever given to a rookie. I can't remember the exact words, but it probably went something like, "Remember, play only quality cards, but we only get an hour, so virtually all your cards are quality cards, and the fewer chips you have, the better they are, and make sure you play aggressively, fold a lot, and if you think someone is full of, uh, nonsense, raise him." We also promised to warn the dealer and players that she was a rank novice, there only to get the satellite going - which I did, just as the first hand was dealt.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that with less than an hour to whittle 10 players down to one, a little luck is going to be involved. It's been estimated that a solid satellite player should win about two out of 10 "typical" 10-handed shootouts. If that's the case, the rate for an event like this ought to be more like 1.05 out of 10 - just a hair more than a fair share. Mistakes were certainly possible, so it's hard to say no skill was involved. But it's hard to imagine anyone had enough of an advantage to make this kind of event profitable, after the house took its $30 (although it's a hefty percentage of the entry fee, it's still the best hourly rental fee for a professional poker dealer and cardroom I've ever seen). All of this is to point out that nobody was there to earn a living, and if there was ever a situation in which a novice poker player should feel encouraged against a raft of crafty veterans (most of us knew all 52 cards by heart, and were sober enough to prove it), this was it.

Given all that, it hardly seems worth describing any hands. It's sort of like describing random numbers. But that just goes to show that the most interesting hands turn up in the most likely places. About 20 minutes into this event, with the blinds approaching rapidly, everyone at the table felt a bit short-stacked - the four busted players even more so. Marianna and I hadn't shown down any hands, but Paul had won a hand, taking the edge off his level of desperation slightly. (The great thing about these events, I've found, is that it's possible to forget about the money completely. There's really no reason to experience desperation in a $15 satellite - if it's your last $15, you're way past desperation. Once that $15 is converted into a few hundred in tournament chips, the real-world money has nothing to do with it.) Marianna was in much more desperate shape than I was, having committed a few bets to K-2 earlier, mostly out of boredom. Perhaps it was not such a bad move, given that it was her first experience with live poker, and it seemed at least roughly in keeping with some of what we'd told her to do. But I would've liked to have seen her raise. So, she had barely more than a big blind's worth of chips. I myself was in better shape, with enough chips for a raise and part of a reraise. I typically play too tight in these kinds of situations, so it wasn't surprising that I was just sitting there bleeding.

Let's move on to the hand of consequence. I'll make it brief, because this isn't really about cards. Paul, from early position, raised. Marianna called with her remaining chips just as I looked down to find A-K. I was happy to put myself all in and let the cards work it out. When only Paul called, I turned my hand up. Paul turned up K-Q. Marianna turned up 8-7. The flop came K-J-10, the turn a blank, the river a 9. I exited with a pair, Marianna exited with a straight, and Paul took our chips with his bigger straight.

The great thing about this hand was how it gave Marianna a little cross section of just about everything poker has to offer, in one nice, neat package: going all in with a weak hand, sweating out a draw, hitting a draw, losing with a strong hand, playing against friends, outlasting some more skilled players, and, most importantly, beating me in the one hand we played together (for which she certainly deserves some kind of plaque). The fact that both of our stacks went to the one other person we knew in Las Vegas was just an extra layer of poetic justice. (Despite having the benefit of our chips, Paul was still the next player out.) For my part, I couldn't have been happier. If she had to lose, better it was to a friend. The same goes for me, but I was happier to finish third in the hand than I would have been to finish second. I think with this satellite under her belt, Marianna may be more willing to sit down in the future, although it's not always easy to find a game so welcoming to novices.

I've had a few memorable hands during my poker "career," not always the monster hands or the monster pots, but the hands with some aesthetic appeal beyond the facts and figures. I still remember a stud eight-or-better hand a few years ago in which I had three aces showing and caught a 4 on the river to make a 6-4 against two very surprised opponents. And my first live straight flush was against Paul, a one-card straight flush against his ace-high flush, and against several other opponents who inexplicably built what's still the largest pot I've ever stacked (in chips, not in dollars). Still, busting out of a satellite on the same hand as my wife, in her first live poker experience, ranks as the most memorable yet.