Close Only Counts In Horseshoes

After losing a flip against a shorter stack I had 30K, when this hand came up.

With about 40 players left and 30 paid, the table chip leader was open-raising pretty much every hand. He raised again in early position and I found AQJT single suited. My options were to call for about 4K and see a flop, re-raise the pot to about 14K or make an intermediate size re-raise.

I had already seen him fold to a re-raise, so I chose the aggressive option and made it 14. He called and the flop came K72 rainbow. Just as I was thinking, "What a god-awful flop," he set me all in. As much as I hate putting that much in pre-flop and then folding, I couldn't find a way to put the rest in with no draw and no pair and reluctantly folded.

Pretty annoying but when I dealt the hand out a few times myself, I'm going to flop something I can call with 75-80% of the time and that was just one of the bad flops. In hindsight it might have been better to make it 11K or something pre, which might make him fold just as often and leaves me more room to fold on terrible flops - but I'm certainly interested in comments on that hand.

After that I was down to about 16K and not being one to hang about trying to mincash, I did my best to get back in the game. Unfortunately when I raised with AQJ9 single suited, the same player called me. I got the rest in on the flop of 873, but was up against JJ98. Even against this hand which has some of my outs covered, I was 36%, but didn't get there. Oh well, gg, thanks to Boyle and Marty and Dave for the advice. As it turned out John O'Shea is the main man at PLO comps right now, well done to him on another sick win!