Survive and Thrive

If you want to win World Series of Poker (WSOP) events, you need to make big laydowns. "Survive and thrive" is an excellent theory at the WSOP. In fact, I tried to use this philosophy every day at the 2001 WSOP. I simply hung around and hung around until I finally picked up a couple of strong hands and won a couple of pots. Late in the second day of the main event, the following hand came up. With the antes at $50 a man and the blinds at $200-$400, Mike Magee, an excellent player from Ireland, raised the pot to $1,200 to go from early position. I had A-6 offsuit in the small blind, and decided to reraise the pot $3,000. (By the way, I was definitely on tilt at this point in the tournament. I had just moved from $56,000 down to $36,000 in the previous 20 minutes!) Mike decided to call the $3,000 raise, and the flop came down A 10 6 – what a flop for me! I bet out only $3,500 to see what Mike would do. Much to my surprise, he raised me my last $28,000! Shoot! What the heck is going on here? Wow … now I went into "the tank" (I started to think for a long time). After a minute or so, I started to believe that Mike had the A Q, which would give him a pair of aces with a flush draw. If he did have A Q or A K, I would still be about a 3-2 favorite. But what if he had 10-10 in the hole, which would give him a set of tens, or A-10 in the hole for aces and tens? If he had a set of tens or aces and tens, I would be drawing to two cards in the deck to win, which would make me roughly a 10-1 underdog! A 10-1 underdog for all of my remaining chips at the world championships of poker? Now, that's ugly! After a while, I decided that Mike had me beat, and I showed my hand to the table and folded it. There were lots of gasps from the players around the table. I was very proud of that laydown. I then said to Mike, "Nice hand." Mike then said, "Phil, I didn't know that you had two giant-size ones. Because you have handled yourself so well, I'm going to tell you what I had. I had the A 10." Mike was so genuine that I believed him. I had made a great laydown, and I would have almost certainly gone broke had I called him. Instead, a great laydown had kept me alive in the WSOP. What a great feeling! Mike then proceeded to tell me, "Phil, believe it or not, I actually had you on A-6 in that hand, and that's why I moved all in. I knew that you had to call me!" After I folded that hand, I went on to run my chips up to about $60,000 or so by the end of the day. By late in the day on day No. 4, I had passed the $1 million mark in chips, and had taken the lead in the tournament. Eventually, I settled for a bitterly disappointing fifth place and $300,000 in prize money – all because I made a great laydown against Mike Magee. "Survive and thrive!"

As I wrote this column at Ted Forrest's house in Las Vegas, Layne Flack came strolling in and said, "You threw away A-6 offsuit? No way! Why do I have to keep hearing about your A-6 offsuit hands?" Layne was referring to the A-6 offsuit that I knocked him out of the preliminary no-limit hold'em event with when it was down to T.J. Cloutier, Layne, and myself. You see, I drew out on Layne when I … oops, that is the subject of next issue's "Hand of the Week." I hope that y'all enjoyed this one. Good luck playing your hands this week.Editor's note: You can often find Phil Hellmuth playing poker online at www.ultimatebet.com. To learn more about Phil, go to www.philhellmuth.com.