Another hand from the Orleans

[Irieguy]

Same tourney as before, $200 total buy-in, almost $6K for first. 290,000 chips in play, down to 15 players. Pays 10.

Blinds 500/1000, Ante 200. 8 players at my table.

The good player to my left has been eliminated. Nobody remaining can really play the game. Everybody would probably be happy with a 15-way chop for $900 or whatever.

I'm on the button, the SB is relatively new to my table. The BB is the SB from the last hand I posted. The SB has only been here for a few hands, but he instantly folded his BB to a min-raise after looking at his cards even though there was 4100 in the pot... which says something about his play.

I have around 25K chips, which is a little above average. It's folded around to me and I raise to 3500 with pocket deuces.

The SB looks at his cards, begins to fold, but looks at the pot and then looks at his cards again. He then looks at me and calls. He has around 18K in chips. The BB folds.

The flop came Kh-8d-4d and the SB leads for 3000 into a 9600 chip pot. I have a hard time putting him on a hand. My instinct tells me he won't fold to shear aggression here. I call.

The turn was an off-suit 3. He leads for 3K again, leaving him 9K. Geez, I was getting 6 to 1 on a call and I was becoming convinced that he wasn't on a diamond draw and that I may have all the diamonds as bluff outs on the river. But I didn't like it and was ready to fold. Instead of folding, I decided to take a little more time to try and figure out what was going on. I was fairly sure he wasn't walking a monster, and very sure he wasn't on a diamond draw. I also felt like he would want to protect 2 pair and would have pushed with a K-8... probably the weakest hand with which he would have called preflop. Did he have K-T or K-J? Seemed like he would try to protect at least K-J. K-T or K-9? Yeah, that seemed about right. So, how many bluff outs would I have on the river? Could I get all of his chips if I hit my deuce? We he fold if a diamond came? Would he fold if an Ace came?

I decided that I probably had 13 outs to win or bluff the pot. That justified a call of another 3K into this pot in my mind.

The river was the 7 of diamonds and he pretty quickly bet 1k. The minimum. He had 8K behind and I could see him praying for me not to raise.

I took the amount of time I thought I would take if I made my flush and raised 8K more, putting him all in if he called.

Results later.

Irieguy