Matt and I went to Commerce yesterday.  I hadn’t played in nearly a month.  This visit was obviously overdue.  I had complete control of the action until Jack Haley, formerly of the L.A. Lakers, sat in the game.  JH is the table captain.  If you’ve played with him before, I’m assume you consider that an understatement.  He’s gives a lot of action and is very fun to play with.

Anyways, here’s the hand of the day.  I was about done playing when JH put up the live straddle.  He convinced a player that had to play a hand at the table but whom he had played with at the must move table to put up a live double straddle for 80.  It didn’t end there.  He asked the next player who obliged and put up a live tripple straddle for 160.  I picked up JJ on the button and the action was folded to me.  I was sitting with about 9,000 and raised to 400.  I wanted to play a big pot and raise a small amount to induce a lot of hands to come along and/or 3bet me.  The sb went into the tank.  He had 3,000 and I was obv going to play against him if he were to ship.  He thought for a couple minutes and folded.  The big blind almost instantly raised to 1320 with 1,500 back.  JH folded and the player in the double straddle raised ai for about 5,000.  I genuinely thought for several minutes before folding.  I shouldn’t have thought that long because the ai player had to have a good enough hand to play for 3,000 since the 3better wasn’t going anywhere.  However, it was his first hand, was in the live double straddler and was anxiously waiting for 20/40.

The big blind thought for a while and was visually very annoyed.  He called and lost to AA.  He said he had QQ but he never showed.   When I folded, the player to my left asked instantly what I had which indicated to me that he had a pretty strong hand.  But why would he if he folded after my raise?  After the hand was over, he said he had AK and folded because the live double straddler made a comment while he was in the tank that lead him to believe that he was very interested in the hand.  I agreed that it was a good read unless he hadn’t looked at his cards.  Neither of us confirmed that we saw him look prior to the action reaching him, but it was one heck of a hand regardless.

I really need to start going more regularly and especially with the WSOP coming up in preparation for playing cash games about half of each week throughout, but I’ve been doing well online and don’t want to overdue it playing live.  I’ll maintain a healthy balance and see how the next couple weeks go.