[Barry]

Angel Fish and I have been in New Orleans for the week visiting her family and playing poker at Harrah's. The games were as good as always but I had not been running too well so far, but we headed down anyway for my last night in town before heading back home to Boston.

The cards turned around some, and I was up a rack at the 10/20 game and we were going to play just a little longer when I'm dealt Q [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] Q [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] in the small blind. One guy was racking up his chips and the dealer explains that he can't have a rack on the table.

UTG raises, 3 cold callers (I told you the games were good) and I make it 3 bets, everybody calls.

Flop is A [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] A [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] 2 [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]

I bet, UTG calls, everybody else folds

Turn is the A [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]

I check, UTG bets, I turn around and look at the bad beat jackpot tote board which is at nearly $6K and call.

River is the 3 [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]

I check and pray that he has the A [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img], he bets, I call.

He turns over A [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] K [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img], and the rest of the table yells "show us the big pair" and I turn over my Q's and the table sort of "erupts"

The dealer tells everyone to freeze until the tapes were run and the deck was counted down. After that they started taking everyones ID's. The funny thing was that UTG kept asking the dealer "I do get the pot, don't I.", but the dealer couldn't push it to him until the hand was reviewed. So finally I get my almost $3K and the rest of the folks are given their shares.

A couple of footnotes:

If the dealer didn't get the 1 fellow to take his rack off the table the bad bead jackpot would not have been awarded.

The jackpot had just been won the day before when it was around $16K, so we just missed out on a much bigger jackpot.

One fellow had just sat down and rather than post, he decided to sit out, setting up the hand for us.

So it was a good ending for the trip.