What an incredible run of cards

After moaning about several bad beats I felt that this run of cards was really remarkable:

I was playing one of my favorite 90-player SnG's at FullTilt. I almost passed on it because I busted out of a PokerStars tourney shortly before in a cruel way (but no more bad beat stories in this post!). As the $20+2's don't run so often I decided to give it a shot. The tournament went smoothly till we were down to about 24 players. My stack of 10,000 chips wasn't too shaby but to make it into the money I definitely needed to improve. Unfortunately it started to go the other way round because my JJ lost to a rivered flush and my stack was down to 5,000. But I told you: "No more bad beat stories" ... so just two hands later I got it all back from the same guy as he missed his flush this time.

Now the fun started ... only a few hands later I received directly after each other: AA,TT,AQ and JJ and boosted my stack from 10K to 35K. The most interesting part was the last of these hands (JJ). I was aware that raising four times in a row may look suspicious. Especially as I continued to bet the flop with big bets for protection reasons and took all the hands down without a showdown. Therefore I wasn't surprised that one guy started to "test" me. The flop was low cards rainbow with one heart. He checked, I bet half the pot. Turn another low heart. He checked, I bet another half pot. River another low heart. Now it got scary as he made a potsize bet. I was almost done with the hand but started to think about his hand. Usually if somebody bets into a flush this way he has it. But the way the flush developed I highly doubted that he hit it here. Of course he could have made a set with one of the flop cards but this was somewhat unlikely too. Instead of folding my hand (calling wasn't an option for me here) I put him all-in and had him covered by about 4,000 chips. No instant call? Phew! No nut-flush for sure. He thought for a long time and finally folded. A 35K pot was shipped to the Shadow. BTW, this was the same guy that crippled me earlier just to pay back shortly after (see above). Don't mess with the Shadow ;-)

It still took another hour till we reached the final table and the money ... but I was in good shape. Made it till 4th place for a nice $198 payday after 220 minutes.

Those are the times I really love poker!

Another thing: If you like to read blogs I can reccommend poker Blogger, a nice ranking list of several other german poker blogs.