I made a nice run in the FTP $322 6-max yesterday only to have my dreams crushed on the bubble. With 25 players left, I was in 5th place. Everyone at my table was shorter than I and had been playing pretty straight-forward except for Imperium, who was sitting directly to my left. He was probably 1st or 2nd overall and was correctly making life difficult for me. Seeing as how it was the bubble, I was looking to raise aggressively and steal from the shorter and weaker players at the table. Of course, Imperium wanted to do the same thing, so he was doing his damnedest to interfere with my plans. In the hand prior to this one, I’d opened QTo on the button and folded to a 3-bet from Imperium in the SB. I thought about shoving, because I think this is often a bluff, but I had an awkward stack for it and I’m pretty sure he knew that I knew what he was up to, which means he can call kinda light in that spot.
Anyway, I unfortunately don’t have the HH for this, but here’s what happened. The very next hand, I was in the CO and came in for a raise with Kc7s. After a moment’s hesitation, Imperium called on his button. I immediately got the feeling that he was doing this in lieu of 3-betting, since he’d just done that the hand before, and was going to give me trouble on any flop. So when the board came Js7d6d, I knew I was going to have to felt my middle pair strong kicker and hope for the best. I made a continuation bet of about 60% of the pot, he raised a little more than 3x my bet, I shoved, and he called with 8d5d. Unfortunately, the river was a 4, and I lost a huge pot to go out on the bubble. The different between winning and losing that pot was probably $10-12K in equity. Bummer.
Still, I’m happy with myself for reading the dynamic correctly. He was clearly calling pre-flop with the intention of messing with me on the flop and just got lucky enough to flop a huge draw. In fact, with an open-ended straight draw, a flush draw, and an overcard to my pair, he was the favorite when most of the money went in. But I imagine he would play it the same with just the flush or open-ended draw, and might even raise the flop if he missed completely, so I’m happy with the way things went down, even though it resulted in my untimely elimination.