POTD #158 Halloween Week Part 3: Four Way Madness

Once again I have a set of twos and things get ugly

A surprising exclamation, a jump scare, or a simple BOO! can surprise a calm person and rattle their nerves, but the hands I picked for Halloween week resemble a more Sisyphean existential horror. Not again. I had already bluffed off a lot of my stack to Talal Shakerchi when I turned KK into a bluff on an ugly board. Then I lost the rest of my chips with a set of twos to Santhosh Suvarna. When I sat down for bullet two, I wanted to ease my way into the bullet. Let’s play some simple hands. Let’s flop top pair, value bet twice, check the river, and win. Let’s three-bet AK and c-bet JTx and win; let’s check/call a flush draw, turn a flush and pot the river. Those types of hands.

Instead, what happened was, I flopped a set and not just any set. I flopped a set of twos, the hand that ended bullet one for me. There are times when I’m playing a poker tournament that something improbable happens, and I almost want to pause the action in the middle of the hand and declare, “Wait, I just flopped a second set of twos in a span of 15 hands. Are we sure this isn’t a simulation?” This is especially the case when you just lost $100k, and instead of viewing a set of twos as the great hand it is, you are having a little Stockholm Syndrome as you recall what your set did for you 45 minutes ago. Of course, the above paragraph is a little dramatic; it wouldn’t be Halloween week without a little exaggeration. I was happy to flop another set, and like most times I have a set and lots of money enters the pot, I am still mostly thinking “What’s the best way to play this set?”, but there’s a little bit of my brain that’s thinking “Man, I’m going to have so many chips after this pot.” Of course, there is no more classic horror trope than the overconfident, often greedy, man who thinks he will be the beneficiary of good fate, only for that fate to be cruelly upturned and for him to become the victim. Today’s hand is part two of a series where I have three twos. Normally, flopping a set is the best thing you could hope for with pocket twos, but today pocket twos were decidedly not my hand, as I flopped a set again but got put in another tricky situation.

2022 Triton Cyprus $100k NLH Main Event
(500/1k/1k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack. Bullet two.

Michael Addamo (184k) makes it 2k UTG, Talal Shakerchi (454k) calls OTB, Viacheslav Buldygin (283.5k) calls in the SB, I (131k) call in the BB with 2♥️2♦️.

Flop (9k) J♣️6♣️2♠️: Viacheslav checks, I check, Addamo bets 2k, Talal folds, Viacheslav calls, I make it 11k, Addamo calls, Viacheslav calls.

Turn (42k) Q♠️: Viacheslav checks, I bet 40k, Addamo folds, Viacheslav calls.

River 122k 7♣️: Viacheslav shoves for my final 77k, I fold.