9
And Then There Were 22
You had to like the chances of a Full Tilter making the final table in the $1,000 No-Limit Hold’em event with Re-Buys when there were only thirty players left. Both John Juanda and Andy Bloch had healthy stacks. The only strike against them was that they were sitting right beside each other at the same table, dramatically increasing the odds that one of them might possibly knock the other out of the tournament.
And then suddenly Juanda was crippled. I suspect it had something to do with the Curse of the Massage. Only minutes after Juanda requested the services of a masseuse, he reraised Amir Vahedi from the small blind to $50,000. Unfortunately, Vahedi wasn’t the only player still in the hand. Christopher Loveland called from the big blind with the last of his chips, and his kings had Juanda’s A-Q beat from start to finish.
Down to his last $30,500, Juanda was forced to play even more aggressively preflop than usual… and he’s already one of the most aggressive preflop players in the world. The only move he could make was to push all in, which he did time after time. Did he always have the best hand? Surely not. But it’s a lot easier to move in with a mediocre hand then it is to call an all-in raise with one. Juanda’s short-stack aggressiveness paid off until he moved all in from the button with K-10. Steve Wong called from the small blind with A-J, and it was all over for Juanda.
Was Bloch sad to see fellow Full Tilter Juanda go? “Of course, but he was on my left so I was happy to see a tough player on my left leave.”
Shortly after Juanda’s departure, Steve Wong raised to $12,000 from under the gun and Bloch found pocket nines in the small blind. Bloch hadn’t quite figured out how Wong, the big stack at the table, had amassed his chips. “He was either picking up a lot of hands or playing a lot of bad hands. One or the other. I actually think he was picking up a lot of big hands.”
Rather than call out of position, Bloch moved in for his last $46,000. ”I’m not going to play the two nines out of position with only $45,000 left. Plus he could be stealing. He thought for a while before calling with A-K. If he had A-Q or A-J, he probably would have laid it down. A-10 definitely. Moving in there with the two nines is the right play, rather than calling. The first card on the flop I saw was the king and I was like, “Uh oh,” but then I was happy when I saw the rest of the flop. Three hearts. I had eleven outs twice. The river was a heart and I doubled up.”
With 22 players left, Bloch is currently in 14th place with $79,500.
