Stack and a Story - Vol III

This stack is from this past Friday night. You should see 2 purples ($100), 5 stacks (40 in height) of $5, 1 stack of $25's (20) and some more $5's and $1's. Here's the hand of the night that helped me get into this position:

The blinds at this game are $1/3 and I open raised to $10 with KdKh with an effective stack of $600. TheMark, sitting directly to my left, re-popped it to $30 and the BB (a player I've not played with) flat called. At this point, I'm putting both on either big Aces or mid-to-high pocket pairs. You'll see why this preflop analysis on my part turned out to be problematic.

Not one to smooth call when I think I'm ahead, I re-raised to $130. I should find out if TheMark has Aces here, however he's been known to flat a four bet with them, so I was wary. I figured the BB would fold, but he again smooth called $100 more. I thought that was odd.

The flop came T99 rainbow. BB checked and I put out a bet of only $150. Why? Well to be honest I hated that flop. Pocket Tens is right in that pre-flop smooth calling range of the BB. I don't like his passive play, but he was deep and I suppose that could have been his style. I also wanted to find out if anyone was willing to raise that bet since it was so small compared to the pot size. At this point, the pot was pretty big and I don't think any one was going to bluff at it since nobody had much fold equity given the remaining stack sizes.

TheMark ended up folding, claiming AK suited later on. Then the BB surprised me and check-raised me to $350. Ugh. Exactly what I didn't want to hear.

So I went into the tank. I looked for tells. I asked him, "Did you really flop a full house?" Luckily for me, I had been paying attention to his play in previous hands and based on that, his response to my questioning (a certain live tell that's been reliable to me), and the pre-flop action, I finally said, "Well if you did, good for you. I'm all in."

He deflated immediately. All he could say was, "I guess I have to call now." The board came 5 and then a Q. His pocket 3's were no good. I almost folded to his flop check-raise, I almost did. But you can't build a stack and a story by folding.