Cards, like fate, can be fickle
By Bob Harkins, MSNBC.com
Posted July 14, 11 p.m. ET Oh how the cards can be fickle. They can make you, or break you. They can send you dancing around the table in celebration. Or they can keep you up all night, wondering what you did to anger the man upstairs. Such is the life of a poker player. Take Hevad Khan, for instance. Khan, of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., spent most of Day 3 building and guarding a massive chip stack of more than $800,000. Then that stack began to twindle as the evening wore on, down to $477,000, but still well above the average. He pushed all in with pocket queens, and was called by pocket aces. | |
Once a dominant force, Khan was about to lose nearly half a million dollars on one hand and get bounced from the main event. But that’s when the cards took a merciful turn. The flop? Queen-queen-8.
The roar from the crowd made heads turn throughout the room, and Khan leaped from his chair, dancing around the room, pumping his fist. From railbird to contender in a matter of seconds, his stack now over $1 million.
A fortunate turn like that can be the catalyst for a deep tournament run. Of course, you hear much more chatter about how bad luck can ruin a dream. The bad beats are always easier to remember for some reason.
For Ciaran O’Leary, it was more a lack of good hands than a dramatic bad beat. O’Leary, who you got an up close look at with this story, scratched and clawed his way through to the middle of Day 2, until, forced to make a stand with a shortening chip stack, he was eliminated from the main event.
“I’m happy with my play. I beat over 5,000 players,” he said. “It’s a really, really gut-wrenching feeling when you get knocked out of a main event. I felt sick, I really did. I felt like I had so much more to give.”
But sometimes the cards just don’t fall your way and you become a spectator. Or in O’Leary’s case, a coach and advisor for his friends.
“I’ve got my two lads in there, and it’s just a matter of getting behind them now,” he said. “The different sides of the rope, it’s just amazing. When you’re sitting there, things are very repetitive. It almost gets monotonous to a certain degree.
“When you come this side,” he said, with a wistful glance at the tables, “it’s like a door’s been shut and you can’t get back in.”
For another example of how quickly things can turn, take O’Leary’s friends, Dennis Lane and Michael Cooper. Both players made it into the money on Day 3, guaranteed at least to double up on their $10,000 entry fee.
Hour after hour they played solid poker, taking tough losses, building their stacks back up. Hanging on, slogging away, trying to outlast as many players as possible and increase their take.
Then after the late break, they sit back down at about 11:30 p.m. Very first hand, Lane goes all in.
“Call me, please call me,” he tells the table.
A guy with pocket kings does make the call, but Lane has pocket aces, and he doubles up.
Very next hand, playing at a table across the aisle, Cooper goes all in with ace-king. He’s called by a player with pocket queens, which bust him from the tournament.
In a whirlwind of action back across the aisle, Lane has gone all in again. But this time he’s made a mistake. He made a raise with jack-10 and gets called. When the flop comes jack-10-3, he goes all in with his two pair. His opponent calls and turns over pocket 3s, for a dominant three of a kind.
“I probably pushed too hard there,” Lane admits. “I probably made a mistake.”
The three friends congregate together and commiserate. O’Leary listens to their analysis, gives critiques of his own, then offers congratulations.
“You boys played beautifully, I’m so proud of you.”
They run off to collect their winnings – nearly $35,000 each for Cooper and Lane, with O’Leary getting a cut of both – then head for the bar. They’ll work out the finances later. As members of a crew, they share in each other’s glory financially as well as emotionally.
For them, it’s painful to be out, but not quite as painful for those who could smell the money, but came up short.
Take the case of John Weafer of Dublin, Ireland. Weafer built a decent stack early in the tournament, only to suffer two bad beats by the same opponent during Day 2. He finished 160 spots away from the money, outlasting 87 percent of the field with no payoff.
Asked how he was feeling, Weafer nodded to the bottle of beer in his hand.
“I finished (playing) half an hour ago and this is my 10th,” he said. “I’m Irish, man, I’m Irish.”
Such is the effect when the cards turn fickle.
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