22
Better Lucky
I won’t be surprised if Erick Lindgren emerges victorious from today’s final table of the $5,000 Short-Handed No-Limit Hold’em event, and I doubt anyone else will either. He’s already won two World Poker Tour tournaments and he barely looks old enough to drink in bars (not that that’s ever stopped him). But at times poker is as much a game of luck as it is skill, and no one benefited more from the good wishes of the poker gods than E-Dog did yesterday.
With three tables left Erick put in a large raise from the button. Fredrik Halling, sitting in the big blind, reraised to $120,000. That’s when I happened upon the scene. Erick was visibly flustered. He peeked at his hole cards a couple times, perhaps hoping they might suddenly change. He needled his opponent, fishing for information. “Why such a large raise?” he said at one point. “You don’t want a call, do you?” Hundreds of eyes were on him. You could tell he was going back and forth on his decision, that it was pretty damn close to being fifty-fifty whether to fold or not. It was estimated that he took seven minutes to decide what to do. It felt more like twenty. I understood his quandary: he liked his hand but a call would require most of his chip stack. His tournament life was on the line.
And then suddenly as if everything had been on Pause and someone hit Play, Erick said, “Call,” and flipped over his cards, showing A-10. Evidently, he believed that by calling the bet he was all in when in fact he was not. Halling must have thought the same as he also showed his cards: A-K. At this point the dealer should have taken control of the situation and called the floor over. Instead, he went ahead and rolled the board, which came Q-10-6-3-Q. By catching that 10, E-Dog, a huge underdog, took the pot. The floorman warned Erick that he could have been penalized for flipping his cards prematurely, but he was not. It was, to say the least, a strange play.
It would get stranger. Reassigned to a table that featured up-and-coming star Vanessa Rousso, Erick would benefit once again from the largesse of the poker gods. After Rousso raised from the button to $26,000, Erick called and checked the 5-4-2 flop. Rousso bet $35,000, and Erick announced he was all in. He was in huge trouble as Rousso had flopped a straight with A-3 and he only had 2-3. The ace of hearts of the river bailed him out, however, as it created a chopped pot.
On a roll he made quad kings several hands later (also against Rousso) and steamrolled his way to today’s final table. The last I looked he was sitting firmly in second place, having amassed $649,000 in chips.
