By Adanthar on June 18th, 2007 (more posts by author)

It sucks when you do, though. 0 for 3 in big pots with a medium stack/winning one pot overall will do that. I didn't play particularly well, but there's probably nothing I could've done anyway. C'est la vie - next year.

Today's sample hand: David Oppenheimer limps with a 7 up, a LAGgy guy to my right overlimps a 9, and I raise 5[32]. They both call. I peel with 5K on fourth vs. their 96 and 7Q (which David overcalls), then obviously fold the [32]5K3 on fifth (lol). Meanwhile, the 967x bets into David's 7Q2x (I might have the upcards slightly wrong but this was the general idea) on every street including betting the river in the dark, David makes a reluctant call with something like a rough 8, and it's good - not because DO made a great read or was right to peel anywhere, but because the 9 managed to misread his hole cards and actually paired twice, confidently betting his worse hand all the way down.

So it went - like I said, I didn't play particularly well, either, but it's pretty hard to top a bustout hand where, after we were all in on fourth, DO had 2 paired by fifth but finished with a 6 low vs. my...jack. Back to running bad.

This all takes second place to Eskimo Clark, though. A few days back, Eskimo had a heart attack during the stud event and was evacuated to a hospital. He was back playing in the razz event today when, apparently, he went into convulsions and lost feeling on his right side. The paramedics were called and tried to get him out, but he refused their help, telling them that he wanted to die playing or something ridiculous like that, and was still in the tournament when I left the room.

I don't even know what to say about this - somebody like Eskimo is so far out there that I have no idea how to relate to him. There were and still are lots of famous old time gamblers in these stud/razz events, and some of them clearly enjoy the games as much as anything else they've got left; more power to them. But Eskimo is basically mailing in what's left of his life to spend the last few hours of it playing a razzament. I obviously feel a lot of pity for this guy, but supposedly, he has family. Where are they? How about Harrah's, which already set themselves up for a lawsuit over his first heart attack (brought on by him playing in the tent outside) and have now decided to let him keep playing? Ugh.

Yeah, I guess the silver lining in this whole razz affair comes down to this: at least I'm not the guy that will inevitably bust Eskimo Clark out of his last tournament.