"I will not get myself into a big pot. I will not get myself into a big pot."

Final story from tonight's session at the Palms.

Standard etiquette in poker is that after you have won a large pot (particularly after you take all of an opponent's chips), you shouldn't "take the money and run." It is considered sportsmanlike to stay for a decent amount of time. This is to give the guy a chance to win some of his money back--or at least give the appearance that you are doing so.

I put that latter condition in because it's pretty easy to sit there for an hour and fold every hand, in which case you're not really putting your winnings at stake. If that's all you're going to do, then it's actually better to just run off, because you're filling a seat that could be occupied by somebody who is going to play.

I've arbitrarily settled on 30 minutes as a decent amount of time. It doesn't seem like I'm running off with the loot. During that time, I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel, a high likelihood that I'm going to end the session with a nice profit. At the same time, though, I recognize that it's a pointless sham to do nothing but fold for the sake of a show of politeness, so I really do play--I just tighten up quite a bit.

During those tail ends of sessions, I want to avoid big confrontations. That's because on a few occasions I've been within a few minutes of banking a nice win for the day, then got stuck in aces-versus-kings, or some other nightmare, couldn't extract myself, and saw the "W" turn into a big fat "L." That's so demoralizing that it's hard to continue to play my A-game after it happens, and I just have to suck up the loss, go home, and feel sorry for myself. I hate that.

So I play, but play tightly and conservatively, more ready to reliquish pots that I would normally contest, never bluffing, etc. I keep a mental image of myself as a bad little boy back in grade school, made to stay after school and write 100 times on the chalkboard, "I will not get myself into a big pot. I will not get myself into a big pot."

Nevertheless, it happens sometimes. Tonight was one of those.

I was up by about $200, which is not huge, but is a perfectly acceptable take for what had been about five hours of playing. Mentally I had basically closed out the session after the last large pot that got me to that point. I put myself into "I will not get myself into a big pot" mode, planning to play only the most premium, favorable situations until it was time to stop.

And then it happened.

I picked up pocket queens in the small blind.* A highly loose-aggressive player in early position put in a raise to $12, and the guy to my right called. Surely I have them both beat, I thought. The raiser is known to raise with anything from any position, and the guy on the button is probably calling with a weakish hand just because he will have position in case he flops big. And surely, I thought, they will both fold to a large reraise, because they both know that I've been playing very solidly. So, I told myself, this isn't really getting into a big pot, because it's going to end as soon as I make a bet.

Yeah, right.

They both called my reraise to $50. Uh-oh. This doesn't feel good.

The flop was 10-6-3 rainbow, which is about as good as it gets for pocket queens. I push $100 forward. This will take it down, I told myself.

Yeah, right.

The first guy immediately moves all-in for about $150. The guy to my right thinks for a while, but then says, "OK, I'm all-in, too." He has about the same amount.

So now there is about $550 in this pot, and it only costs me about $50 more to call their all-in raises and see the turn and river. That's about 11:1 pot odds. Hell, even if all I was holding was a 7-2 offsuit, the math would compel me to call in that situation. I knew it was a mandatory call (mandatory, that is, in the strategic, smart-play sense, not actually mandatory by the rules), but I felt like throwing up. This was exactly what I had been trying to avoid, and yet here I had gotten sucked into it, one step at a time, each step looking (falsely) like it should be all I had to do.

I could see my immediate future looming: One of my opponents must have flopped a set (three of a kind), and the other had some sort of weird combination backdoor flush and straight draw that seemed worth chasing, and would probably get there, leaving me with the worst of three hands, and decimate my carefully-accumulated stack of chips. Ugh. Scotty, beam me out of here! Can we get Superman to fly super-fast around the world to change its direction of rotation and turn back time? (I saw that in a movie once, so I know it's possible.)

I flipped over my queens, and was indescribably relieved to see that the original raiser had pocket jacks. One down, one to go. The second guy had just a suited A-10 for top pair to the board. Neither of them improved, and I took down the biggest pot of the night--one of those lovely things that takes the next three or four hands to get stacked up nicely.

I went back into "I will not get myself into a big pot" mode. And I didn't, thereafter. But surprisingly, I kept running into favorable situations where I could risk a small amount to potentially win a large amount, and several of them paid off. I kept wanting to leave, but couldn't put together 30 consecutive minutes without taking a pot that was big enough to warrant resetting my "give them a chance to win it back" clock. It was a strange but delightful run of good luck. I was also by then playing with the advantage of the biggest chip stack at the table, so that even if some disaster struck, nobody could knock my profit down to less than, say, $200 or so (at least not with one pot).

I finally found a time in which I could leave without being impolite, and ended up having had the biggest cash-game win since early August (which is when this remarkable night occurred: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/warning-do-not-try-this-at-home.html).

Whew!


*Remarkably, I had queens eight times in this seven-hour session. They won the pot seven of those times. I had aces once, raised, and got no callers. Never had kings or jacks. That's a very weird distribution of hands, and an incredibly favorable outcome for them.