My Aces Got Cracked

Nothing upsets poker players more than getting their aces cracked.  It happened to me last night.  My chip stack was below average but I was pretty close to a cash.  I don't remember all of the details, but I think that if three more players were knocked that would have put me in the money.  Of course, the real money in poker is making it into the top three, and ideally, winning.

I started counting that money when I bet, villain raised, I shoved preflop with aces and he called with kings.  Mathematically I couldn't have been in a better spot.  With no suits in common I win that one 81.26% of the time.  Of course, poker is a game of probabilty, not certainty.  Over the long term, I win in that situation often enough to make a profit.  In one tournament anything can happen..  The kings in that spot win 18.74% of the time, and this time they did.

Unlike most players, I don't freak out when that happens.  Poker is referred to as a "volume game" for a reason. I play often enough (I almost 500 tournaments this year) that losing with aces is a glitch, not a disaster.

I lost most of my stack in that hand.  I hung on and looked for a good spot to shove, but I missed again and was knocked out.  As Doyle Brunson famously said, "That's poker folks."*

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doyle_Brunson