Going into the final hand, I had about 18 million in chips to David’s 8 million or so. The blinds were 50 and 100 thousand, with a 10 thousand ante. David and I had played 6 hands so far, and none of them were of any significance. 3 times the small blind on the button had folded, twice the small blind on the button had raised and the big blind had folded, and once David raised from the small blind on the button, I called preflop, but then I check-and-folded on the flop.
Going into the final hand, David was the small blind on the button, and he made a standard raise to 300 thousand. I looked down at the 8d 8c. Clearly too good of a hand to fold, so the question was whether to flat-call or reraise. I chose to just call for two reasons. First, I was out of position the rest of the hand, and second, I didn’t think David would put me on a pocket pair too quickly postflop, since I believed he would expect me to reraise with almost any pocket pair preflop. Thus, if I flopped a set, it would very well hidden. The flop came 245 rainbow. I was very confident that I had the best hand. While it was perfectly possible that David had a larger pocket pair, or had outflopped me, it was a lot more likely that he had two big unpaired cards. I decided to check-raise, and David obliged by betting 500 thousand. I raised to 1.6 million. David quickly called. Well, David almost always acts quickly, so that alone was not a tell of any sort. However, my feel of the situation was that I had the best poker hand.
