Poker after Dark Cash Game
Cardrunners.net is an internet poker instruction website manned by the three players in this week’s poker after dark, Taylor Caby, Cole South, and David Benefield. The team makes instructional poker videos. Their opponents are three old timers of the game, Doyle Brunson, Gabe Kaplan and Eli Elezra. Each player bought in for at least $100,000 and played $200/$400 NL Hold’em with a $100 ante.
Early on, they decided to introduce the 7,2 prop bet. In this scenario, if a person wins a hand and shows the table pocket 7,2 the win the pot and an extra $1000 from each of the other 5 players. As we’ve seen on high stakes poker, this can sometimes lead to players losing tens of thousands of dollars trying to win a $5000 prop bet. It makes for good television.
From the beginning, the Vets seemed to be out-performing the nets, with exception of Benefield, who came out and won the first two hands without a showdown. It seemed like both South and Caby got a bit conservative when Doyle would play back at them. If they were continue betting and Doyle would call their bets, they would virtually shut down for the rest of the hand.
Benefield, on the other hand, was very aggressive and took a lot of hands down preflop. His image looks very tight aggressive, but when you see his cards he is really just playing from position a lot and squeezing. One hand Kaplan raised the bet to $2600 with A,Q and Benefield then re-raised up to about $11k with Qc7c. He got Caby to fold 88 and Kaplan to fold A,Q. Later on Benefield again squeezed Kaplan’s opening raise of $3200 (AJ) by re-raising to $9600 (with q,10). He took this pot down preflop.
In the beginning, a lot of 7,2 hands were showing up, so it set up the idea that many of these big preflop re-raises could just as likely be a bluff with 7,2 or a serious attempt with KK or AA.
The young players had straddled almost every chance they got and were often encouraging a re-straddle from the Vets and each other. This didn’t often happen and it induced Benefield to say “more like the Nets vs Nits”. Nit is a term used to describe a tight player at a casino who doesn’t like to gamble much. If he saw what Elezra was calling raises with, he might have a different opinion of the Vets. Some other funny moments included talk about Brunson’s famous book, Supersystem. All of the Nets remark about their reading of the book at a young age and now play against the author.
“I like that book by the way. Thanks for writing that Doyle. It helped me a lot,” said Caby. You couldn’t really tell if he was joking or serious. It was a very interesting dynamic, and a fun table to watch a poker cash game.
