Strange session at the Rio

Sunday evening at the Rio turned out to be one of the most peculiar poker sessions I've ever put in. For all practical purposes, I played only one hand.

I sat down in Seat 1, and in the first hand I watched a woman in Seat 4 put in a pre-flop raise to $30--pretty unusual for most $1/$3 games, even coming over a straddle, as it was.

My second hand I was dealt A-Q offsuit in early position. Again there was a straddle. With so little knowledge of the table, I decided not to press this hand, just call and see what developed, ready to trash it if needed. But the same woman raised again, this time to $35. Now, it's not impossible for a player to pick up two good hands in a row, but this was unusual enough to make me wonder if she was a hyper-aggressive type, with a lot less than the bet size was representing. Hard to know so soon after sitting down.

Even stranger, though, was that her whopping raise was called by both of the players immediately after her. I noted, however, that they both appeared mighty reluctant about it. When the action came back to me, I decided to shove my entire $100 buy-in. My thinking was that A-Q played pretty well against whatever this woman could have, assuming she had the kind of wide raising range that I'm suspecting from watching her first two pots. I think she will call, but given the reticence of the two late-position callers, I think they will fold, perhaps reading my limp-shove as the A-A or K-K that such a move often signifies. If I'm right about my guesses, my A-Q will be heads-up against maybe a top-20 hand, with the extra $70 in dead money in the pot giving me an excellent price.

But that's not quite what happened. The woman called, as I had predicted, but then so did both other callers! Oops! I don't really like A-Q against three opponents! Oh well. Can't take it back now.

The flop was Q-x-x, which was about as good as I could hope for. All three opponents checked. The turn was another small card, and the woman pushed all in. The other two guys folded. We exposed our cards, and I was delighted to learn that she had J-J. My hand held, and I more than tripled up just that fast.

This table, I was quickly to learn, was one of the most insanely hyperaggressive I have ever played at. In fact, short of the ones in which one or more players were going all-in before even looking at their cards, it might be #1 on my all-time manic tables list.

It was therefore, in a sense, fortunate that after that big hand I went completely card-dead--just an endless stream of J-4, Q-2, 8-3, etc. I had no difficult decisions about what kind of ammunition was good enough to take to war against this small army of LAGs, because the dealer was giving me nothing more than a peashooter. So I spent the next hour folding and watching the crazed fun from the sidelines.

I did win one more small pot, when, miraculously, I found myself against a single opponent. He checked the flop. It had missed me completely, but since I knew that he had watched me fold about a million hands in a row, I thought I would probably have some credibility here, bluffed at it, and won. That pot basically compensated for the blinds I was paying while sitting passively by.

There were two or three more spots in which I called a normal-sized pre-flop raise, but caught complete air on the flop and had to give it up. And that was the sum total of my action for the session.

I left 1 1/4 hours after I arrived, cashing out for a $226 profit (not including the three nice chips shown above to add to my collection).

I guess sometimes one hand is all you need to make a session worth having played.