Buckhead Poker

I successfully stayed away from online poker yesterday, but I still got into a live game!

I went to a Buckhead home game for the second time. It's a pretty good group of guys who play, and they have a fairly nice poker table and a dealer. I broke even for the night, but it was pretty fun.

There were two highlights of the evening.

The first was when one of the guys at the game insisted that a made hand always has better odds to win than a drawing hand. That got a lot of the guys (including me) laughing, and one of them set up a prop bet. The bet was that they would set up hole cards of 22 and KQs on a board of JTX, with the J and T of the same suit as the K and Q. So the KQ drawing hand would have nine outs for the flush, another six outs for the straight, and another six outs for top pair. I wish I could have gotten in on the prop bet!

So the two guys set up those cards on the table and then peeled off the turn and river. They bet $5 a hand for 15 hands. Of course, the KQ hand won the vast majority of the time. Everyone was laughing because the guy with 22 couldn't believe he was losing. Afterward, we looked up the exact probability on a Web site. KQ turned out to be a 72 percent favorite in that situation.

The other funny thing was a hand I was involved in. I looked down at my hole cards from the big blind and saw Jh 6d. It was checked around and the flop came JTX, all diamonds. With top pair and a very weak diamond draw, I made a pot-sized bet, which was very small. I got one caller. The turn was an unsuited rag, and I bet half the pot. I still got one caller who appeared weak. The river brought a fourth diamond, making me a flush with the 6 of diamonds. I bet about half the pot again, and the other guy called.

"Well, all I've got is a flush with the 6. Can you beat that?" I asked.

"You only have the 6? I think I can beat that flush," the other guy said.

Then I flipped up my cards. I was as shocked as anyone to turn over a very different hand from the one I thought I had. I had the Q of diamonds and the 6 of hearts. I hadn't just made a flush on the river, I had made a straight flush! On top of that, I probably extracted near maximum value from the hand because I think my opponent wouldn't have stayed in if I had been betting stronger.

Good times, good times.