The Round of 16: The Luckbox Strikes

Have you been watching the televised episodes of the 2006 National Heads Up Poker Championship on NBC? The most recent episode to air covers the Round of 16, and it confirms one of the truisms of tournament poker. Even the greatest players still need to have the proverbial horseshoe firmly in place on occasion --- they'll seldom win tournaments without at least one glorious suckout or other bizarre turn of fortune.

By now everyone knows that Ted Forrest won the thing --- thereby explaining the wave of Forrest-covered magazines now plastered across the land --- but only in today's episode did we see how close Forrest came to not making his way into that high-test final matchup against Chris "Jesus" Ferguson. Remember that Forrest is not only good; he's very, very, very good, probably among the top ten players in the game.

Still, I'd rather be lucky. As Forrest was in this one. And there's not much the cameras can do to edit the facts, though in retrospect the ratings gods were smiling down at Harrah's that day in early March.

The setting for the suckout was Forrest's Round of 16 match against the unknown Ernie Dureck, who'd already went up against Scotty Nguyen and Paul Phillips and survived them both. In this match, Dureck had taken roughly a 3:1 lead, catching aces and getting full action on them from Forrest.

Forrest, already way short, caught a nice enough hand for the spot, something like A-10 off. Dureck, though, found the rockets again, came over the top of Forrest's raise, and was called all-in.

Drumroll for the suckout: Two baby cards on the flop, and runner-runner babies on the turn and river (a five), to complete the wheel, force a chop, and keep Forrest in the match. And on the following hand, they got it all-in again, with Dureck again a favorite, though only 57:43 this second time.

It didn't matter.

Yee gods. Figuring the odds at the time the money went in (pre-flop in both hands), Forrest had less than a 10% chance of squeaking through this two-hand box and continuing on against Dureck. Those aren't impossible numbers, but it's still an important reminder of how fickle Lady Chance can be. I tend to root for the underdog, and here's an instance where a relative unknown (Dureck) did everything right and was simply not rewarded by fate. That's as tough a beat as can be.

An excellent episode, overall. Included are a questionable slow play (as commented on by Gabe Kaplan) by T.J. Cloutier in his match against Daniel Negreanu, and the capturing of some hyper-aggressive --- and largely unsuccessful --- plays by Josh Arieh and Scott Fischman.