7 Stud Hi/Lo Tourney

I qualified for another one of those WSOP fantasy league free roll tourneys on FullTilt on Monday. As you can probably guess by the title of the post it was 7 Stud Hi/Lo. I did surprisingly well considering my complete lack of skills in this particular game. 1000 people qualified, a little over 400 actually registered and maybe 200 of those actually showed up. 90 places paid. I finished just out of the money at 107. I probably could have folded to the money if I wanted to, but where's the fun in that?

Since there were so many no-shows my table started off playing three handed with the other five just contributing ante's for us. I thought I was in trouble after the fist couple of hands when the other two guys came out aggressively, but I started playing some hands and pushing them around and winning some decent sized pots and before I knew it I was the table bully. And it only took me a little over one blind level before I remembered it was Hi/Lo. In my defense though, I was trying to cook dinner at the same time so I wasn't all that focused.

Eventually two of the other dummy stacks showed up so we were five handed for a bit, but for the most part it was just us three. I completed/raised with just about any three cards. If I had top door card of the three of us I raised, if I had low door card I raised, if my hole cards could beat their door card high or low, I raised, and usually I took the pot right there. It did a lot for my confidence, but probably didn't help me out too much with that whole learning proper hand selection thing.

For most of the first hour or so I was the top 30 and had a fairly comfortable stack when all the no-shows finally started busting. As the tables started to fill up with actual players, I started loosing some hands, and stopped growing my chip stack. The killer was when seventh street brought me trip eights in a big three way pot where no one was likely to have a low, but brought one of my opponents a full house queens full of twos with all three queens hidden.

Before I knew it I was dangerously close to the next big hand I played being almost a guaranteed all-in. I decided to wait until I had what I thought would be a monster, or else hope I could just hang on until the money.

It was rolled up jacks that killed me. I think starting off with three of a kind on the short stack in this game is bad luck, because the last time I played a 7 Stud hi/lo tourney (maybe it was horse) was a blogger event and I went out when I got all my chips in with rolled up 5s only to see my opponent's up cards come heart after heart after heart, and I lost to a flush. This time it was spades. I got all my chips in on fourth street, and cringed as he got spades on four upcards, and I failed to pair any of my other cards. He actually didn't get a flush, but managed a low straight and scooped the pot.

Oh well. I did have fun playing unlike previous attempts at this format where I just sat there and got abused and felt like I had no clue what I was doing. I'll have another shot next week at the normal 7 stud event.

Originally posted at blog.pokerwords.com