PLAYING ONLINE WITH DOYLE (Sort of)

I signed up ages ago for Doyle Brunson’s online site but I never got the gumption to play there. On Thursday I got an email promoting their bounty tournament. Dolly, Mike Caro and some minor celebrity actor were all playing with $250 bounties on their noggins. Trish was meeting some friends that night anyway, so I decided to signup and play with Doyle.

700 people joined the tourney and I found Doyles’s table which I followed closer than my own. Dude talked about what a presence he has in person and even though it could have been his niece playing for all we knew, people were star struck kissing his ass nonstop. Everybody had to wish him luck and remind him that he was a legend. He tried to keep up with the chatter acknowledging niceties the best he could. He even tried an “lol” once making me wonder if it wasn’t the niece. afterall.

He didn’t show down many hands, but won half of someone’s stack in the first half hour to make himself even more of a worry to the other players. Of course, they weren’t showing the worry but trying to get Doyle to talk about his dogs and other assorted frivolities. They were jamming the chat box so much that he was lucky to answer one in five. There was also a host at the table that tried to answer some of the stuff too. They must have learned from earlier attempts.

I had coasted along at what turned out to be a pretty aggressive table. These guys have watched a lot of online poker and they brought in every hand for a raise. Dude said recently that being able to play after the flop has made him a better player to contend with. That was certainly what these guys were lacking. They didn’t seem to have any feel for the texture of the flop and they didn’t respect the re-raise in context with how people were playing their hands.

Since limping in early position was out of the question I just waited for a good enough hand to play. It finally came in the name of KK on the button which I was allowed to play heads up without tipping my hand courtesy of his raise from late position. He had read all about the continuation bet and that allowed me to check-raise. He seemed like the kind of player that would bet it all the way down even if he had only an ace, but I didn't want to give him a chance at an ace. I figured he'd fold any weak ace and call only underpairs. He surprised me by going all-in with a weak ace which wasn't the outcome I had wanted, but at least I was in lead and did take down the hand. I won enough chips there to get me through the next break and I was back to watching Doyle.

Mike Caro was the first to go down and then the actor guy followed in the next 30 minutes or so. When Trish came home I bragged that my stack was twice as big as Doyle’s. Of course that had no real significance, but I thought it might impress her. As it went, my stack stayed pretty healthy and Doyle dwindled. His “M” was down to around 5 before he got desperate. It reminded me of the Bellagio tourney when Dude said that he made his stand with around 20,000 chips and although Doyle had about half that many at the time, Doyle stayed patient and made the final table. If I remember right, Doyle's M must have been between 5 and 10 when Dude made his exit. In this case, Doyle eventually went all-in on the button with QJ and some lucky slob won $250 for scalping him. I finished around 200 of 700 when my A9 had to get lucky and ran into JJ. At least I outlasted all the pros.