Thursday
November 26, 2009
Last night, it was Brian Townsend’s turn to try his luck against Isildur1, and very early on it was clear that he would be doing a lot better than most of the others who have challenged the Swede. In just over 1 000 hands, he was able to win $1.1M, something that is very impressive considering that they were playing ‘only’ $200/$400 PLO as opposed to $500/$1000 that we are used to seeing Isildur1 at.
From the graph above, you can see that this match was incredibly one-sided, and that Brian Townsend almost didn’t have any bad periods at all. Despite this, Isildur1 was not a happy camper when Townsend announced that he was leaving. And even if he promised to give Isildur1 another shot in a couple of days time, Townsend had to endure some choice words his opponent.
Townsend flops the second nut straight and has Isildur1’s bottom straight dominated. $304K pot
This was a bit of an unlucky hand for Isildur1. Of course, Townsend had him thoroughly dominated on the flop, basically drawing to a jack to tie the hand, but after the 5-bet preflop, it seemed unlikely that Townsend should have hit a straight here. He can almost certainly be placed on a pair of aces or kings, and this means that the two remaining cards in Townsends hand has to be exactly QJ or J7 to have Isildur1’s hand beat. As you can all see, this time Townsend had indeed flopped a higher straight, so there was nothing Isildur1 could do but to send his chips across the table.
Ziigmund turns the nut straight and Isildur makes a move with the nut flush and a gut shot draw. $472K pot.
Ziigmund also wanted to join in on the fun, and played a mini session with Isildur1 in which he won $267K. In this session he managed to win the two largest pots of the day, something that obviously was the main reason he came out on top.
In the hand above, Ziigmund hits the nut straight on the turn, and true to form, Isildur1 makes a move with his big draw. As it turned out, it was the wrong time to make a play at the pot, and when Ziigmund moved in, it is actually very marginal whether Isildur1 is getting the correct pot odds for his call.
As it was, Ziigmund had two of his winners covered, which means that Isildur1 was a 10-3 underdog and that the pot should have been close to $517K to make the call correct. In an ideal world Isildur1 would have had 14 winners, but it is very likely that a few is taken away by Ziigmund’s, so this is a case when folding would have been the best choice. However, it is not a huge mistake, and in the heat of the battle it is not easy to lay down a big draw like this.
It wasn’t all bad for Isildur1, though. He managed to win almost $150K from his favorite prügelknabe, durrrr and also $211K from David Benyamine in addition to $85K from Phil Ivey at NLHE. But overall, it was a pretty grim day for him.
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