In Stud High you have to pay attention to having your hand on the Premium hands, having a Premium position and deciding when to stick around with your hand. The following example was played against me in a $0.5/$1 Stud High $1/$2 game.
I was in the big blind for $0.5 and the UTG player raised to $1.0 looking to pick up the blinds. I made the call, why not, he has about $4 left so not much equity and I have nearly full pockets. I was however happy to have any sort of equity in the hand because my hand was pocket 8’s. Therefore, I didn’t really mind paying to see the flop and try to hit that two outer. lousy for holding my hand and having to pay almost 2 to 1 to see the flop.
As the flop started coming out I watched my aces and kings nicely turn almost every time someone bet. On the pre-flop I had over 5 times the big blind, actually half the pot, and I called along with 2 other people. The flop came Q-8-4 rainbow. That was a bit of a surprise seeing there were 6 people in the hand. My aces were still good, so I checked knowing that I might still beat his aces. They were both gone on the turn and I netted another $0.5.
On the river my aces where crapped out on the button and I lost to a full house. I wasn’t really that surprised at winning as there isn’t much material in a low stake limit game and my aces where still good. I though I might have interesting Corp at the showdown as I had hit my set and wanted 2nd place in the tournament.
The after action was pretty crazy. I met a friend in a nearly even pot with the winner getting $4.5 and my $4.0 chip stack. I wasn’t too upset about missing the money as I had done pretty well for the day, still I gained $0.5. I took a pretty big sigh and decided to wait out the hand until the heads up play was completed.
I got backfield quite a few hands after that and began to get pretty annoyed at the time. It was pretty boring basically just that I was folding hand after hand. I had begun to turn a profit slowly but surely in the beginning of the session, now all I wanted to do was stop folding every hand and go for it. This usually worked other wise, but not on this particular day.
I didn’t know it, but I was about to enter what is known as a “zealous situation”. This is a situation where the poker players tend to get tight in their play and try to preserve their stack. This is a very good thing for us. It means we are due for a good pocket hand!
About 20 minutes later I was in a rather agreeable situation. It looked a lot less appealing and less appealing at that. I had missed the flop and in fact had two poor cards in the mix. Not much you can do about that, but we will call it even.
This is about the time youiate what seems a forever. The blinds where starting to really take a serious turn for the worse. This was about the time the “Zealoteers” where making ausual run. They raised pre-flop and either won or lost (depending on who was still in the hand) and went all in. Most of the time they lost, but once in a while they win, and that was enough to reel me in.
Just as I was hoping, the “Egp88” were about to turn into an Early Position Tight Aggressive stack. They were raising like everybody was behind them, and then they went and did something stupid and went all in. It was a mistake, but a clever one. They proved that anybody would call a fairly sized raise with hands like these.
So, trying to phase out the players as I had done with the maniac, the stack went nuts. I could not let this kind of an advantage continue. I needed a big hand, something like pocket Q’s or maybe pocket K’s.
I waited roughly 30 seconds before calling them all in. I wished I had that ace, that would have made things quite simple. One by one they went inside, each one calling the previous one before it went out. There was no way I was letting them all know that I had begun playing class acts. That one big mistake could have changed my day.
I never did figure out what type of player each one was. It was a mix of all those styles. It was like I was being drawn into a disguised trap.