Player's Stories

A Response to Mark Burtman's
"I Read Your Article"
By Todd Tucker

After reading Mark Burtman's recent story "I Read Your Article" regarding the way he "elevated" his game during final table play at the championship event of the Mid America Classic by mucking J-8 (What a truly great play!), I thought I'd share a hand that he decided to play.

After finishing fourth in the no limit hold'em event the previous day, I too made the final table of the championship event. By the time we were down to six handed. I only had about $8,000 left. Mark was second in chips with the chip leader seated to his left.I needed to get a hold of some chips before I was blinded down much further, so when I picked up A-Q in second position, I moved in with my 8 grand.

When the action came to Mark, he peeked at his cards and declared (in a rather indecisive tone), "I'm gonna call it." There were no other callers and since we weren't playing under the rule of being forced to expose hands at the final table, we left our cards face down. I put Mark on a middle pair and said, "good call" as the dealer flopped three rags. The turn paired a deuce, then a beautiful queen fell on the river!

I quickly flipped my cards over, pushed my lady out from under the ace and prepared to collect the $17,000 pot. I couldn't believe my eyes when Mark showed me the A-2 of clubs. A-2??!! How the hell did that happen? I disgustedly hit the floor with my hat, then collected myself, shook Mark's hand and walked away.

Burtman made one of the worst calls I've seen and was really lucky. He thinks it was brilliant because he had quite a few chips. However, not even his chip position can be used as a valid argument. First of all, he had the worst hand and knew it. The best he could be was a three to one dog.

Second, he was committing roughly 25% of his stack while holding junk (Way too much). Third, he was taking the chance of doubling up the second best player at the table (second only to the winner) at his expense, allowing me to be able to move my chips better. Fourth, and this is very important, the chip leader was on Mark's immediate left. If this guy wakes up with a hand, he's blowing Mark out and taking me on heads up.

From about the final two tables on in, Burtman was hit with the deck a few times to take the lead. So while he pats himself on the back for mucking the J-8, he should also look back at all the hands in which he had the worst of it but just got lucky. Fittingly though, the luck ran out when he got head up with the eventual winner as he put it all in with the worst hand and couldn't manage to suck out.