Being owned

24. April 2007 | Category: 50outs

Yesterday we had a very unpleasant experience – we have been dominated by player "Pokkermon" on PokerStars. When I came home Katja was playing the 100/200 game and was having a good comeback after a swingful day. Watching her for a while I suggested to take another shot at 200/400 – Katja has done a few so far and they have all been ok or even good. So we decided to sit and play togehter, talking some strategy and exchanging knowledge and thoughts about the players and situations. So far so good, Katja won a few hands and we have almost been ready to stand up and finish for the day when the unavoidable happened – we lost a large key pot vs. a two outer on the river. There was no steaming or tilt but we stayed.

Owned by Pokkermon

Pokkermon had direct position on us (playing 3-5 handed) and suddenly started playing us – I mean directly. Every time Katja raised he reraised, putting in every possible bet the whole way. I guess Katja is the only player there able to lay down hands like bottom pair/weak kicker (at least it fealt like this lol) and he took advantage of that. Add a few better hands, a few suckouts on turn and river, a few missed monster draws like AsJc of spades on a 9s-Ts-Qs board which lost vs hands like 3-3 and you get the picture. This lasted for about an hour.

A friend told us that ‘Pokkermon’ is a shared account between two guys and one of them is the famous "Texas Limit King" (TLK) – no idea if this is true but that guy played good – better than we, at least yesterday night. Without really wanting to he made us change our game style, becoming to passive and not raising enough. Whenever we tried to break out of this bad style with hands like KQs he called us down with like 5-2 on a T-J-2-7-6 board after raising the flop, calling a third bed and raising the turn, calling a third bet there also. Pretty good reads. I am not saying there was any luck involved, he played perfectly. That does not fealt good but motivated us again to improve our limit holdem game (in fact it fealt terrible). Had a few hands turned out different the result would have been different, sure, but thats not the point. We got to add strategys to handle such situations to our arsenal. Even worse, it was not personal. He just played his style, exploiting every weakness without any long thinking. Sigh.