Rockets, The Hoy, and I'm Out

Paul Darden in the 10s. He had a nice looking ice cream cookie sandwich for $3.95. I offered him $2 for the remaining half, but he said no way.

6s guy. On successive hands he had black aces, I had black aces, then Darden had black aces.

Vladimir the terrible. He played a wide range of hands, Darden tried to stay away from him after awhile. He limped in mybig blind, I checked with 10-4o, and two aces flopped. We checked it to the river, when the four paired me. I called his $200 pot bet, and he flipped over his baby ace.

I was down to $1600 in chips, and the blinds were $100/200 (Level 4). I had limped earlier when I had aces and was able to take down a decent pot, so this time with one limper I decided to pull out the Hoy. I couldn't work the CC-Hoy as I only had one $25 chip. To the uninitiated, the Hoy is a raise where you are all-in except for one chip or $1 ($1 normally online). Hoyazo developed this technique, and I had modified it in tourneys. Anyways, it did rattle folks as they didn't really know what to make of it. I used it once as a re-raise with As-Qs and got a guy to laydown. With aces, an M of roughly 5, and a pot of $500, I decided to Hoy and hope someone had a hand. Vlad counted it down and made the call, and I was delighted to see his Ah-Qh. The flop came Qc-2s-4d (I had moved all-in in the dark for my last $25). Turn came a great 2h, and the river was just a nightmare, Qd. And that was that, I was packing and out.

There is an absolute visceral feeling (if that's the right word) to run up and tell everyone about your bad beat, yet eveyone basically wants to avoid you when you're telling folks. I don't think I was photographed at all, which is a bummer. I asked another guy covering this to shoot a photo, but unfortunately he was tied up and it didn't happen.

I'll compose a post later today with a wrap-up of my takeaway from this. Lots of lessons learned for sure about how to play these types of tourneys. CC, out of the World Series of Poker Event #5 $2k NLHE.