Kevin's Rush & The Duke's Demise

There's an aggressive local player who frequents Planet Hollywood named Kevin, an Asian guy in his late twenties. Every other local I've talked to hates playing him. Actually some say they hate him personally, because of the way he plays cards. This shows he's doing something right.

Tonight he went on the sickest cardrush I've seen in a long time. It started when he isolated a bad player with an AK reraise. Then the table went crazy with calls and pushes behind him. He caught his ace and more than tripled up from his original $200 stake. Then he played AT in a raised pot and checkraised the QJ9 board. His opponent pushed for nearly $200 more with JJ, and Kevin decided to gamble and rivered a K for the nut straight. Then Kevin raised with JJ, the bad player bet into him on the rag flop and he raised to $200, another deep-stacked player behind him pushed all-in for close to $300 more on top, and Kevin eventually called the deep-stack's 88 bluff. Finally the bad player, who had won a couple big pots in the interim, went broke with top pair against Kevin's set for another $500. When the dust settled from this run of hands, which transpired within the space of an hour, Kevin had close to $2K in front of him.

Meanwhile I was up a couple hundred in the game, but the Duke was struggling. He was in the game for $400. He was actually down to $20 when he tripled up and then went on a rush and had $300 in front of him. He was satisfied with the comeback and planned to leave when the blinds hit him. With two hands to go before having to post his blind he picked up my favorite hand, pocket nines. He limped with it, and when a shortstack raised behind him, he decided to play the hand heads-up and raised enough to put the guy all-in. The guy had QJ and rivered a Jack.

The very next hand, the Duke went into a full-blown Tony G routine. Feigning extreme tilt, he shouted, "Go ahead, take it all!" He pushed his remaining $250 across the felt, knocking his stacks over in the process. "You want it? It's yours! You think this is a joke? Take it all! I'm tired of this!" I knew he had a monster even before he turned to me and said, "I have King Kong." The bad player called and showed T9. The flop was all blanks, but then the turn was a 10 and the river was a 10. Runner-runner for trips and the Duke says he's done playing for a while.