I’m in the Isle of Man for a UKIPT event. I can't find a cab, so I end up walking through an absolute downpour and arrive thirty minutes after it had started.
I take my seat, absolutely soaked. In the first hand, I’m in the big blind. An aggressive Irish online regular — someone I play against every night — opens from early position.
I look down at my hand and defend 
. The flop comes J-6-5 rainbow, with one diamond. I check and my opponent bets.
I decide he has nothing a lot of the time here, and this deep, early on, it’s actually a good flop for me. I have all the sets including jacks which I wouldn’t three-bet this deep, and he may not be opening 66 or 55 from under the gun. He definitely doesn’t have any two-pair combos.
I raise. He thinks for a while and calls.
Misreads can happen to the best poker players.'F*** it, I can't fold jacks'
The turn is the 
so I pick up a flush draw and decide to bet big putting maximum pressure on hands like AJ. He looks unhappy and calls.
The river is an offsuit four giving me the nuts. I shove, he tanks and eventually mutters, “F**k it, I can’t fold jacks,” and calls.
I proudly show my hand, the whole table gasps and looks stunned, and the dealer pushes the pot….to my opponent.
I look confused and about to protest when I see my hand is not like I thought, but 
.
I walk back to my hotel through the downpour, my Main Event over (it was a freezeout in those days).
As I look back, one of the things that amuses me is that at the time (pre-solvers) everyone who saw or heard the hand thought it was terrible and I’d lost my mind, but these days I could spin it as a good bluff that just ran into the top of my opponent’s range.
On a flop where I have lots of value, it’s a decent bluff with no showdown value and plenty of backdoors — so lots of good turn cards I can barrel. One of those cards arrives on the turn so it’s a good spot to barrel. And then on the river I’m at the bottom of my range, blocking the nuts, so it makes a good bluff shove.
Dara O’Kearney is an author of seven best-selling poker books, pro, coach, commentator, and the co-host of the GPI award-winning podcast The Chip Race. Dara is sponsored by WPTGlobal and has his own training site, SimplifyPoker.com. Follow Dara on X
