Small Pair Play, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Embrace Cedric Benson

Friday night, I'm up in my home poker game, playing the cash game after taking a first place chop in the tournament. I'm holding a pair of fours in middle position, pre-flop, and make a small raise. The small blind calls, and then the big blind goes all-in.

Realistically, there's no way I should call. My best hope is that the big blind has air or Ace-King for a coin flip, and the small blind will fold. The all-in move isn't a huge chunk of my stack, and if I make the bet, the small blind can't raise, since he's got about the same number of chips as the big. And I've just got a feeling a 4 is coming. I call... and so does the small blind. He flips over Ace-King, the big flips over a pair of Jacks. I'm basically needing to make trips to take down the pot. It's a bad decision.

So when the flop comes as a 4 with other rags, that's really far too useful, and the turn and river don't change matters. I wound up taking a bad beat of my own later, when Ace-King suited falls to Ace-Seven off, but I still end up making the second most of anyone at the table.

The next day in my auction fantasy football draft, I'm staring down the barrel at Cedric Benson, who really is the football equivalent of a small pair; a potentially winning play that's going to need something else to go well. He eventually gets priced up to a lackluster $12, which despite his lack of talent and the generally terrible prospects of the Bengals, I'm happy to go for, simply because he's all they have.

And as I'm looking over my roster the next day, I'm realizing that Benson really could be the key to my draft. If the Bengals are better this year and he stays in the role, he's going to be on my roster for a long time at that price; it's not like tying up a quarter of my salary on a 30-year-old LaDanian Tomlinson is anything but a one-year strategy. If he fails, I'll be working the wire to find some other RB option, especially if one of the three players that I've got in front of him gets hurt.

And that's what life is, really. Most decisions aren't slam-dunk moments where you commit to decisions that are obvious. Instead, they involve taking on more risk than you'd like, and having to be comfortable with less than sure principals. And knowing that if you make enough of these moves, you're likely to either go rich or go broke, since they are the kinds of plays that wind up getting involved in big pots.

So, let's go, Fat Ced Benson, you three yards and a cloud of suck. Let's see you rejuvenate Carson Palmer, put up 1,000+ yards on the ground, and maybe score a half dozen touchdowns. I don't need you to produce quads on the flop and give me the nuts / auto-win. But if you do? That'd be nice. And I'd claim to have sensed it coming all along...