Winning one for the good guys

I took quite a long break from online poker, starting with my trip to Florida, then the whole Black Friday thing. There wasn't any particular reason I didn't get back into it in between those things; I just didn't.

This week I've played, I think, five small buy-in tournaments (i.e., $20 or less) as I'm getting back to it, but had only one min-cash to show for it--until now. Today's tournament was the kind that makes such efforts worthwhile: I took it down, for a $600 win on the $22 entry fee. There were 98 players, so it didn't quite make Bodog's guarantee, and we had a small overlay.

I entered the final three as the short stack, and ended up extremely proud of how patiently I played it, since that is rarely my strong suit. I let the big stack on my left bully me endlessly, until I lowered the boom on him the first time and got a double-up, then a second time to knock him out, in the process giving myself a 5:1 chip lead going into heads-up play. Then it took less than 20 hands to first chip away at the other guy to get him down to fewer than ten big blinds, then knock him off.

By far the most significant hand that propelled me into a commanding chip position, from which I could pretty much coast to the final table, was my old friend, the Mighty Deuce-Four. Bodog is in a big battle with the various companies that make hand-reading software, trying to prevent them from datamining and giving players heads-up displays, and as a result make it really difficult to post hand histories. This set of images is the best I can manage. It's cumbersome, but you can still see what happened, which is that I flopped the nuts and slow-played it, trapping the player with top pair:

There were two felicitous outcomes. (1) I picked up a ton of chips. (2) Hilarity ensued. Here's the chat transcript that followed:

[dukedaddiee]: u called me with ***king 2 4 off?
tms9054: nh can't believe u called with that
[dukedaddiee]: ***king dik
[dukedaddiee]: calls 1400 pre with that and flops nutz
[dukedaddiee]: what a ***king JOKE
tms9054: sry bro
MrMoose123: why can't I ever get free chips like that???
[dukedaddiee]: wpw
[dukedaddiee]: ill note u ***king dik
[dukedaddiee]: 2 4 off
[dukedaddiee]: cmon
tms9054: hard to believe he called with that
[dukedaddiee]: dude i raised to 1400
[dukedaddiee]: wow
[dukedaddiee]: cant belive that BS u u***ing dik hope u run awful for months dude
[dukedaddiee]: gl rest of u
[dukedaddiee]: couldnt write anymore notes
[dukedaddiee]: bodog suks fills up to fast
[dukedaddiee]: ***king jerk
[dukedaddiee]: 2 54 off
[dukedaddiee]: latr

I think it's safe to say that Bodog players fail to grasp the awesome power of Deuce-Four.