I played in a cash game with Dmitri Nobles tonight. You may remember that he is the tall black gentleman who amassed a huge chip stack the 1^st few days of the 2006 37^th Annual World Series of Poker Main Event. He eventually lost them playing really fast, and finished in 76^th place collecting $65,973.00 … This is his only cash list in the Cardplayer.com database. Now let me say that he is a really fun and interesting individual to have at your table and I enjoyed having him around.

 

With Dmitri Nobles at the table I thought juicy.  He played lots of hands and the board flopped to whatever he was holding. He made hand after hand, houses, quads, and his stack grew. So did mine, but not really from his stack.

 

A hand came up where he raised in early position and I flat called with 4s5s figuring he would not put me on a hand either … The flop came with 2 spade. He bet and I called. Well I made the flush on the turn. He checked and I trickily checked behind to induce him to bluff at the pot on the river. He bet a more than pot sized bet. I had 3 times more than his bet and I thought well my flush is small but he could have a Q9 for a straight or 10 J for 2 pair … Oh he could have any darn thing …  --- I ran into his Straight …  Straight Flush that is …

I could have just called his big river over bet but I pushed for over 3 times as much instead of calling ...

 

It is a mistake to assume that since you can not put a player on a hand that they are following along the statistical likelihood that

If you have 2 spades and there are 3 spades on the board then the odds they also have been dealt 2 spades is very low, I believe less than 5%. But I am not sure. I do know that if someone wanted to know the odds that they would be dealt 2 spades next deal ten handed is about 6%.

 

The truth is a big bet on the river which, is what I expected as a bluff, turned out to be the Stone Cold Nuts.

 

Why do I embarrass myself writing this? It is because if I right it down I will burn it in my brain and perhaps next time I will make a better play and just flat call the river.

 

I also will read this out loud into my computer and save this as an mp3 music file. I will then load it into my mp3 player and then while I am someday listening to random music tracks I will hear myself read this blog and thus again remind me that I can play this situation better next time against a player whose range of hands is the same as Sammy Farha … 169 hands from 23o to AA and all of them for a raise in any position.