HugePoker

I won a Step 6 tournament tonight. On a scale of “oh my god I can’t believe I just did that – I never thought I would in a million years” it’s pretty trivial next to the recent triple crown event, but on a scale of “nice money in my pocket” it rates pretty well, and on a scale of “piss off my old pal Dan by forcing him to compute how many dollars per hour I just made sitting around in my pajamas” it’s pretty much off the charts.

I wrote about Steps tournaments around this time last year, when I was playing a lot of them, in fact I wrote two epic posts about the first Step 6 tournament I played and won … first describing the tournament itself, and then a long post with an analysis of the bubble hands from the tournament, with some great back and forth with some of my readers questions.

This won’t be that kind of epic, I promise (though when I look back at that second post I’m still pleased with the tome I created). I will cut and paste a bit from the first post that explained the Steps tournaments:

They’re single-table tournaments (9 players) and if you finish in the top 2 or 3 you advance to the next Step. They start at Step 1 for $7.50, Step 2 is $27, Step 3 at $82, Step 4 $215, Step5 $700 and the final step, Step 6 costs $2100 to play.

So I’ve been playing a lot of them again, at the same time of year because this is when Pokerstars runs their “WCOOP” series, which means that you can play in a Step 6 tournament that awards seats into the Main Event of the WCOOP (World Championship Of Online Poker), but then you are not forced to play the event – you can unregister and take the $5200 in tournament dollars, which is pretty much cash. So that makes it a good time of year to be playing Steps tournaments for me. Last year I did exceptionally well at generating Step 6 tickets, but not so well at converting Step 6’s into cash, and the whole experiment, which looked so rosy at the time of those two full-of-hope-and-promise scholarly blog posts, ended up with a small loss. This year I’ve done a pretty good job of generating the top tier tickets, and I’ve only played two of them, coming in 5th in the first one for the $900 booby prize, and then winning this one tonight, so minus $1200 in the first one and plus $3100 in this one. Not a bad start at all.

The blow by blow of the tournament is either not as interesting as the one I posted about last year, or I’ve just become jaded … “yeah, played a $2100 buyin tournament tonight – won it – got a little lucky in one hand – no big thing”. One notable aspect of the tournament was that it had Peter Eastgate in it – 23-year-old Danish phenom who won the main event of the WSOP last year. This step 6 tournament, such a big deal for little old huge, was one of four tournaments the young champ was playing – the other three were $5600 buyin heads-up matches – so he had almost $20,000 in play on four separate windows on his screen. I hoped that the frenzy of his heads-up matches would prevent him from putting his full attention onto the piddly little $2100 tournament, but … surprise surprise, he played pretty well, until he made a questionable shove from under the gun when he really should have still been a little more patient, and his 9-6 ran into the chip leader’s K-K, busting him out in 5th and making me extremely happy (he and I were the short stacks at that point). Funnily (yes it’s a word, DAN) I had KQ-diamonds in the hand, and would have had a very difficult call against either Peter or the chip leader, but against both of them it was an easy fold … when I saw the Kings I thought Peter had just done me a massive favor by taking the bullet meant for me, but the board came down T-J-2-A-4 with three diamonds, making me the nut straight on the turn and the nut flush on the river, so I would have doubled or tripled up if I had played the hand.

With the young champ gone, we were on the bubble and I was the short stack, but not by much:

Seat 2: AceTenBJ (3480 in chips)
Seat 4: chapmoney (3766 in chips)
Seat 5: iownoknp (17003 in chips)
Seat 7: strike1 (2751 in chips)

A few hands later I got a bit lucky – I made a perfectly good shove with A-8 and the chip leader made a perfectly good call with A-Q-suited and it looked like another $1200 booby prize was in store, but a bountiful crazy Eight on the flop held on for me, boosting me up from short stack to best-of-the-non-chip-leaders. From there I’m happy with my play – I was able to get the weak inexperienced player to fold three times to small raises preflop when he could have taken sizeable bites out of me each time by re-shoving, and I pulled no such fancy trickery on the other two more seasoned pros, just shoving when it made sense or when I sensed an opening, and otherwise staying out of their way.

In the end I got all my chips in with my A-K-suited against the rookie’s A-T, and a King on the flop pretty much doomed him – the nut flush on the river was just gratuitous extra violence against the poor kid … he was already drawing dead on the turn, no need to disembowel him on the river … sorry man, that was harsh.

So that’s $5200 in prize money from a $2100 ticket, in an hour and twenty minutes, and yes I was in my pajamas.

-huge

It’s been an intense week and a half of online poker since my last blog post. In case any of you couldn’t or didn’t watch the video from my last post, I did indeed (after one very lucky hand) win myself an $8,500 Aruba prize package, including the $5,500 tournament seat and $3,000 in travel cash. That was Sunday, ten days ago. Fast forward to Friday, five days ago, and the real fun begins…

Friday night I logged on to my bodog account, for no apparent reason – I almost never play there anymore – and I happened to notice that there was a $55+5 tournament starting that looked like it might end up with a small overlay (guaranteed prize pool exceeding the actual buyin money, so that the site has to cough up some dough to live up to their guarantee), so I jumped in. 160 players, $3,000 for 1st place … and I won it. Woohoo! It’s always great to outright win a freezeout tournament. Sure, it’s great to win a multi-prize satellite too, but there’s nothing like being able to say “I won that tournament and no-one else did – I ended up with every single chip from every single table.” And when you don’t win, even if you make a lot of money for finishing 2nd or 8th or 285th, there’s still that voice saying “you didn’t really win, you lost, someone else beat you, and they’re going to make more money than you did”. The problem is that if you usually play tournaments with hundreds or thousands of players in them, you’re just not going to win very many of them no matter how good you are.

It has been decreed by pocketfives.com that any player who can achieve three outright wins, on three different poker sites, over the course of one week, shall be declared a “Triple Crown Winner”. The tournaments have to be of a certain size: 100 players minimum, $10,000 prize pool minimum, so you can’t win a triple crown playing in $3 tournaments. So winning a triple crown is hard. You have to be at least decent at poker and pretty good at tournament endgame. You probably have to be under 25 with a solid/obsessive video-game childhood so that you can play 15 tournaments at once so you can crank out at *LEAST* 100 tournaments in the week (though you’d have a better shot if you could do 200 or 250, like “moorman1”, the guy who’s won the triple crown 8 times – he literally plays as many tournaments in a week as I do in a year). It also helps a lot if you live outside the U.S. so that you can play on all the poker sites that have closed their doors to American players. It also would help a great deal not to have rehearsals scheduled every night from 6PM to 10PM Pacific time, which is pretty much prime time for good-sized higher-buyin tournaments.

So it was without a great deal of hope that I decided to take a small, half-hearted stab at poker immortality (maybe that’s stretching it – winning a triple crown is not like winning a WSOP bracelet, but it is one of those things you can point to and say “I did that”, and it sticks around for life, or as long as pocketfives.com doesn’t go out of business). I figured out which tournaments I could play that were not between the hours of 1PM and 10PM (I couldn’t play anything after about 1PM because if I did well in the tournament I wouldn’t make it to my rehearsal at 6), which was a pretty big obstacle. I also tried to find tournaments between 100 and 400 players – they needed to have 100 players to qualify, and if they have 1000 they’re just too hard to win. And there just weren’t very many tournaments that fit the bill, but I did my best.

[OK if you want to skip the poker blow-by-blow and jump to the exciting conclusion, scroll down to the last few paragraphs]

Complicating matters was the fact that this is WCOOP month on Pokerstars – WCOOP is the World Championship Of Online Poker, a series of big-buyin, massive-field tournaments that I want to be playing, and that I’ve already won two tickets into, but that offer no reasonable probability of an outright win, so they kind of suck time and resources away from the triple crown quest (again, since I’m not a 22-year-old who can play 18 tournaments at the same time). So on Sunday I played in the $215 WCOOP event (with 11131 players), made a decent run but busted out after 4 hours with no prize money, then played a couple of hyper-turbo satellites to win a seat in the next $530 buyin WCOOP event, not intending to play it, just to take the tournament dollars and run, but I failed to realize that I was playing the satellites within a couple of minutes of the event starting, and when I won the second one I played, it registered me for the target tournament and it was too late to unregister. Oh well, I guess I’m playing it … $530 buyin, 6219 players, $472,000 for first place. And … I played like crap. Actually I played OK for the first few hours and then I went through some sort of brain-dead phase where I just pissed away my chips and got very short-stacked. And then I doubled up on a coinflip, slapped myself (figuratively), and got my head back in the game. Strangely enough after that I think I played very well, and made it to the bubble (900 players) with an average stack. I made it into the money and a bit beyond, but ran into a miserable hour where nothing went right and I just kept bleeding off chunks of my stack. I busted out in 660th for a $932 prize after 9 hours, more like 13 if you include the first WCOOP tournament, and I had been playing since the moment I woke up, and in spite of my old pal Dan’s mathematically-challenged retort that I shouldn’t complain about sitting around in my pajamas making $100 per hour, it felt pretty disappointing and grueling.

I was in no mood to find triple-crown-positive tournaments to play that night, but when I woke up the next morning I checked out the schedules on the different sites and plotted a course. Played a $30 rebuy and managed to burn through 5 rebuys and an addon without going anywhere … so $213 down the drain, finished 103rd out of 190. I sort of gave up on the triple crown at that point – it was the last night before rehearsals started, so I could have played the evening tournaments, but Rachel had just returned from out of town and I was burned out, so we had dinner and watched a movie and then … Oh OK I’ll take one more stab at it, there’s a turbo tournament on Pokerstars at 11:40PM, and it’s a turbo so I won’t be up all night playing it … $109 buyin, 250 players … and I won it. $5,125 for first place.

So now I’m in a pickle. I’ve got 2/3 of a triple crown nailed down, which I’ve never done before. This is a pretty significant accomplishment in itself … in the past 6 years I’ve played 1248 non-satellite tournaments and won 27 of them outright (not including our regular $5 or $10 buyin home game which I don’t enter into my database, and not including satellites, even when I had to finish first to win them). 10 of those wins have been live, so that leaves 17 online outright victories. Two of those were from my early years when the buyin and/or the prize pool were too low to qualify for a triple crown, and 5 of them had fewer than 100 players in them, which would also disqualify them from consideration. OK now that I’ve actually done all that subtraction it’s a little depressing … in 6 years I’ve only booked 10 outright victories in triple crown qualifying tournaments, so the odds against winning two in a single week, let alone three, are daunting. The last time I won a TC-worthy tournament was January of 2008. (In fairness, I play a lot of satellite tournaments that don’t qualify, and I do well in them, so I shouldn’t get too sad about the freezeout dearth)

The next day is my first rehearsal, but I can play some tournaments in the morning and early afternoon. The third tournament needs to be on a third unique site, which pretty much leaves me to FullTilt and Ultimatebet, and with my rehearsal conflict there’s almost nothing on Ultimatebet that will work, so I concentrate on FullTilt.

10:30AM, $50 + 1 rebuy + 1 addon … I busted before I could even take the addon, in 171st out of 280.

The next one I could play is $100 with unlimited rebuys at 1PM, but that could be cutting it close with rehearsal, and the field is tough, and if I really go into it pursuing a win it could be a several-hundred-dollar escapade, and I bail. So I go to rehearsal and come back at 10PM…

10:30PM, $30 + 1 rebuy + 1 addon … not encouraging – I mess up and think that it’s an unlimited rebuy tournament, play it as such, bust out and don’t understand why I can’t take a second rebuy, and once again I’m out before I can take the addon, in 141st out of 190 players.

11:00PM, $75 buyin … no success, card-dead, busted in 201st out of 305

Midnight … $109 buyin, the “Turbo Hundo”, 270 players, finally some excitement. I start off well and have a good run, grabbing the chip lead approaching the bubble, but I lose a big coinflip and squeak into the money with a short stack, busting out in 25th with a pitiful $162.

Nothing more to play after that, sleep, one day down, only two more full days to go to win the crown.

Clearly the only good daytime choice is the 10:30AM tournament on FullTilt, so I play that the next day, vowing to be careful not to bust out before I can take the addon – if I want to maximize my chances of winning, then clearly buying as many chips as I can is the way to go. It turns out not to be a major concern, since on the 5th hand I flop a set and stack off against a guy with Aces, doubling up to 6,000 chips right off the bat. No major action for the next 100 hands or so (hence the old cliché that no-limit poker is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror – not really true, but fun to quote) and then I get a repeat performance of the low pair flopping a set against Aces, this time with a guy with Ace-King going insane when he flopped a gutshot and two overcards so that I actually nearly tripled up to 18,000. Funnily enough the guy who went crazy with A-K is an online superstar with well over a million dollars in online winnings, and a holder of the triple crown himself – I really don’t understand the way he played the hand, but maybe he’s just so far beyond me that I can’t even grasp the subtleties that he’s processing.

Another 100 hands go by with only a slight increase to my stack … I resteal from the small blind with a pair of threes and the raiser calls, the flop comes Ace-King-Deuce, about as bad for my hand as it can be, but I figure it might look just as bad for him if he’s got something like a pair of nines, so I fire and he goes away, and I’m up to 28,000.

Just a few hands later I get a bit lucky … I raise with Ace Jack and get reraised by the big blind. I might sometimes fold here, but given the player and my position (cutoff) I don’t think he necessarily has to have a big hand, and I make a crying call for a third of his stack. The flop comes Ace-high with three hearts, and I have the Jack of hearts, and he doesn’t even match the pot with his stack, so there’s no way I’m folding. He has Ace-Queen with no hearts so I have 12 outs (any heart or any Jack will win it for me – I’m pretty close to a coin flip on the flop). A heart hits on the turn and I’m up to 40,000 chips.

From here on it’s pretty intense battling, no more 100 hand gaps without major action. I made it to the money (27 players) with a very strong stack, sometimes the chip leader but usually staying in the top 5. With 16 players left I go for a resteal-shove against an aggressive and obnoxious player with Q-5, and he calls on the button with Eights. Oops. I nail a Queen on the flop (Woohoo!) but he picks up a flush draw and a gutshot on the turn (uh oh) and hits his flush on the river (boooo!), at which point he starts jabbering on about “Justice!” and what an idiot I was for shoving with a queen and a five, etc etc. It’s not just his behavior towards me that has me maligning him – he kept mouthing off at anyone he played a pot with, and even taunted a couple of players when they busted out on the bubble – ugly. I’m knocked down to 50,000 and he doubles up to 44,000, and I’m not one of the chip leaders anymore. I build my way back up to 70,000, but bluff off most of it to the same asshole when he calls me down with 88 on a 9JJ55 board. He goes ballistic in the chat window again. At this point I’m short stacked (20k) and my nemesis is one of the chip leaders (with 140k). I double up with AQ against KQ somehow (avid fans will remember that that was the matchup that sent me packing in the 2007 WSOP). I pick up AQ again, this time suited, and this time against a solid player making a re-steal bluff with K-2, which has a much better chance to beat me than KQ did, and indeed he hits a King on the turn, but I spike the now-necessary Ace on the river and I’m back to 80,000 chips.

We get down to 10 players, the final table bubble, and I’m about average with 82,000, obnoxious nemesis has over 100k. We’re at two tables of five, so action is fast. There’s a decent money jump ($320) from 10th to 9th so no-one wants to bust out now, but I’m really playing for the win and the triple crown. Asshole raises under the gun, I flat on the button with Ace-Jack, flop comes Jack-high and I think BINGO. He bets 12,000 on the flop (of course) and there are two clubs on the board (I have the Ace of clubs) and there’s just nothing for me to do but fire, and I do, and he has Queens. DAMNIT!! Of all the guys in the tournament I have to bust out to this dick-wad. CRAPPPPP! Nine on the turn, not a club, things looking pretty dark for the triple crown until … Jack on the river. Bink!

The very next hand I pick up Ace-Queen, and the now-ranting obnoxious guy is in the big blind with his sad 21,000 chips (blinds are 1500-3000) and I think surely he’ll reraise me, but maybe he doesn’t want to bust out to me either, and he folds. The very NEXT hand I pick up Queens, and it’s not my nemesis this time who re-raises me, but it is the same hand matchup: A-J vs Q-Q, and this time the A-J does not suck out and we’re on to the final table, me with 270,000 chips and the next best stack at 175,000. In three hands I went from a 3:1 underdog to even make the final table, to being the dominant chip leader in the final nine, with fumes from the triple crown starting to waft off my computer screen.

The obnoxious guy continues to babble about how unlucky he is at the final table, and I can’t resist typing “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy” in the chat window. When he busts out a few hands later I type “gg” and he types “what do you mean, gg? Yours isn’t” and I reply “it’s a polite thing to say when someone busts out of a tournament … you wouldn’t understand”. I try not to get mixed up in chat-window pissing matches, but sometimes a little cattiness is just plain fun.

At the final table I find AKs, happy to flat call a raise in position until another player shoves for 65,000 and the initial early position raiser re-re-shoves for 160,000. People chided me for taking so long to call, but it did feel like a tough decision – it’s more than half my stack, either one could have Aces or Kings, at least one of them could have a pair, or worse yet one could have a pair and the other could have another Ace-King, taking away two of my outs and leaving me drawing to a chop. But again I think “I’m in this for the win” and I call, and they have JJ and QQ (best I could hope for short of both of them having A-Q) and a King on the flop settles it quickly. Now I have almost 500,000 chips, just over half the chips in play, the triple crown is floating ghostly in front of me like something out of Hamlet, and the short stack with 16,000 chips is ready to offer up sexual favors in exchange for me knocking out two players and securing an extra $800 in prize money for him.

So now I’m in a great tactical spot. The others don’t figure they have much chance of winning – they just want to move up the prize ladder by watching others bust out, and I just want to accumulate chips anywhere I can get them, so I can put pressure on everyone. I do so with extreme prejudice until we get down to 3-handed, me with over 600,000 chips, Borzini555 with 225,000 and LuckyRiver1 with 85,000. They’re measuring the crown for my head when disaster strikes - actually, first a mini-disaster and then a major one. The mini-disaster was that my computer crashed. It had been behaving strangely, and the screen-capture software that I use to record sessions was choking a lot, so I shut it off. But then email wasn’t working, so I couldn’t send out updates to my fans, and I couldn’t even bring up gmail on a web browser, but hey, at least the poker software is still running … and then the computer completely crashed with the dreaded blue-screen of death. I restarted my main computer and scrambled to another one but that one needed to download a new version of the poker software before I could play, and by the time it was ready I had my main computer back online, brought up the table and found that we were on our hourly break. Not sure how many hands I missed, or how much the break saved me, but it was pretty stressful, thinking “Those short stacks are STEALING MY BLINDS!!!”.

Computer running again we come back from the break, and then the major disaster … The button (inexplicably) limps and I take the discount in the small blind with J-7. The flop comes Jack-high with two clubs, I fire off a min-bet and the button raises. OK I don’t want to go crazy here, but I’ve got top pair in a three-handed game and I’m not folding to a small raise. The turn is a third club and I decide to make one stab at the pot and to give up if he doesn’t fold – if he’s got a Jack it will surely be better than mine and he’ll call, if he has clubs he’ll raise and I’ll fold, if he has a single club he might call and hopefully we’ll just check it down on the river and I’ll win … no big deal. He calls, OK, now I’m just hoping for no more clubs on the river, but the river brings … an off-suit Seven giving me two pair … the ONLY card that could get me into trouble. I consider betting but decide that inducing a bluff is better if he has a single club, he might value bet anyway if he has Ace-Jack, and if he has me beat somehow, my check will likely save me money. I check, he bets 160,000 (3/4 of his stack – not sure why he did that) and there’s no way I can fold here, and he has Ace-Jack after all (woohoo!) but they’re both clubs (booooo!). Borzini555 nearly doubles up to 544,000 and I get a severe tree-topping down to 315,000. If he had shoved all his chips in I still would have been forced to call and he would have taken 50k more of my chips – I can think of no sound reason for him not to shove there – there’s no way I would call 160k and not 210k - A very substantial mistake on his part.

But I’m still in sad (or at least sadder) shape, worrying that I may have just thrown away the only chance I’ll ever have at a triple crown (it really is quite likely that I’ll never get that close again even if I play poker for the next 30 years). I make matters worse by doubling up the short stack with my K9s vs his A3, but I knock him out a few hands later when my A9 holds up against his A6. So now it’s me and borzini: 370,000 chips to his 540,000, and I’ve got work to do.

I chip away at him steadily – he pretty clearly is not used to playing heads up, and I know from his online record that he’s generally inexperienced and has never made a final table before, let alone gotten heads up in a major tournament. He plays accordingly and I pick up a lot of small pots. I win a decent pot with two pair to pull ahead of him but he pushes me out of the next one and we’re even in chips. I flop trips with 8-3-off and get a lot of action from him before he folds the river – and I’m back in the lead, 555k to 360k. I run into another hand where I give up on trying to push him around but then the river has to go and hit me (with top pair this time) forcing me to call off a bet when he has trips, and damn it if he doesn’t have a slight lead again. He wins a good pot on the next hand when he flops top pair and I flop bottom pair with a gutshot and now he’s got me 530k to 385k … I can’t believe I’m LOSING to this guy.

I push him out of a pot with pocket deuces and it’s closer… 425k for me, 490k for borzini, and then the big blow comes…

I have Jack-Ten on the button and raise, he calls. The flop comes an eye-popping, angels-singing, drool-inducing 9-8-7 with two diamonds. He checks, I bet 16,000, small, hoping he might sense weakness and checkraise, but he only calls … now a Five hits on the turn, which either kills me or crowns me – if he has a Six he’s got a lower straight and will pay me off, if he had a good made hand on the flop it will kill my action because he’ll be afraid of the straight. He checks and I decide I need to maximize my earn if he’s got the straight (and charge him to draw if he’s got diamonds) so I bet 55,000 and he calls. The River is a meaningless King and borzini comes out of the woodwork, firing 112,000 at me. If he’s bluffing I’m not going to get any more money out of him anyway, so I shove and he calls, and he’s got 6-5 – he flopped the lower straight and we were trapping each other all the way – just a nasty cooler for him and a beautiful setup for me. He’s crippled down to 65k and it takes me three more hands to mop him up.

Ship me the $7,345, ship me the Triple Crown … actually in my mind (which is quite flexible in these matters) I’ll just extend it back a week and a half to include the Aruba package win and call it a quadruple crown. Definitely my best ten days of poker outside of the World Series, and an accomplishment I never really expected to achieve – poker version of lightning in a bottle.

I waited to post this until they had published my glory: CLICK HERE

I know I’m not the oldest guy to have won it - JohnnyBax has a year or two on me - but I have to scroll back to 2005 to get to his photo or any one else’s who looks older (and yes there is, as far as I know, only one female triple crown winner, and it is, of course, Annette15).

Better than my picture on “the wall” is that my profile page will always have that little “triple” icon under my photo, which may look small, but it’s a pretty big deal in “the community”.

I’ve just started playing a $320 WCOOP event with (so far) 2300 players … if I can just manage an outright victory in this one, that would be my first 6-figure score … cross fingers.

-triply huge

I’ve been meaning to put up yet another alliterative Aruba post title ever since I bought my tickets to fly to Aruba in early October for the Ultimatebet Aruba Poker Classic, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. I knew that this past Sunday would be the first “mega-qualifier” for the $5,500 main event in Aruba, so I hoped I might have something good to post about. This year I bought my plane ticket even though I hadn’t won myself a seat yet – the last two years were pretty fun, and there’s plenty of poker to be played even if I were to skip the main event (and live satellites there to try and win a seat anyway) so it seemed like buying the tickets wasn’t too bad of an idea.

But of course I really wanted to win my seat in advance … I’m getting tired of poker travel without having a big seat locked up, which has been all too common lately – Ireland, Costa Rica, and even Vegas this year. So I looked forward to Ultimatebet’s first mega (in online terms a “mega” is a satellite that guarantees an unusually high number of seats into the target tournament – in this one they guaranteed that they would award at least 25 seat-packages, whereas their normal Sunday qualifiers only hand out 5) on Sunday at 2:30. I played in a super-satellite (a satellite for another satellite) earlier in the day and won my entry, so I really only had $200 invested to begin with, and I got off to a good start … made a decent run in the tournament but in the end got a little short-stacked and ran Jacks into Aces, bombing out in 180th out of 430 players when I needed to finish in the final 26 to win the $8,500 package ($5,500 tournament seat plus $3,000 in travel cash).

I didn’t even realize until I busted out that there was another qualifier running in 15 minutes, called the “Second Chance” event, this time with the normal 5 seats guaranteed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to play – I’d just been sitting there for three hours and it was nice outside and I didn’t relish the idea of dropping another $550 when things have been on a slight down-swing lately, but … I’ve already booked the flight, I really should try to win the seat … OK I’ll play.

[If you don’t want to read the whole knock-down-drag-out account of the tournament, skip to the end of this post and watch the video of the explosive end of the tournament, or just CLICK HERE. You might find it pretty funny to watch and listen for a couple of minutes, even if you're not a poker player.]

This one only got 79 players, and they needed 85 to meet the guarantee, so they were paying exactly 5 packages and nothing for 6th. I treaded water for a while, built my stack very slightly from 3000 at the start to 3300 or so, then down to 2700, down to 2400, down to 1800, 1500, 1300, 1200 and things were looking dire, direr, direst until Ace-Ten-suited looked pretty enough to re-shove with, and the guy with Ace-Eight-off was committed to the pot and had to call me, and I doubled up and never looked back. Well, maybe “never” is too strong. Five or Six hands later, I got it all-in preflop with a pair of Tens against an idiot with Ace-Nine-suited (OK maybe I can’t call him an idiot – he was in pretty much the same spot I was a few minutes ago with the Ace-Ten-suited, but it makes me feel better to call him names) and the idiot caught an Ace on the Turn to make top-two-pair and knock me down to 1037 chips with the blinds at 100-200.

Serious Diretown. But I don’t stay there long – I fold one crappy hand and then see the beautiful sight of pocket Aces with another player raising into me … a quick double up to 2500 and then three hands later the blinds go up to 150-300, so I’m really still semi-dire, and pocket fives under the gun look good enough to shove my puny stack into the middle and just pray no-one calls. Prayers not answered as the very next player reshoves to 4300 and I think my goose is cooked … I whimper and pray for him to have A-K or A-Q, the only hands that make sense that don’t crush me, and this time my prayers are heeded as he turns over A-Q, but I’ve still got more groveling to do as I beseech the poker gods for “no Ace no Queen” but they are fickle, and capricious, and they show me the Queen on the flop but plant some sort of retinal block so that I don’t even notice the redemptive, born-again Five sitting right next to her for a few seconds. So I double again to 5500.

Just a few hands later I’m in there again, this time with Queens against Ace-Jack, and this time I think I can legitimately call him an idiot, since the stacks were bigger and he had way too healthy of a stack to be messing around 4-betting me with Ace-Jack. Praise gods my tweener pair held up this time and I’m up to 10,500.

More dog-paddling between 9000 and 11000, another pair of Aces bump me to 16000 (yes I got a lot of premium hands this tournament, but not all of them held up). More sideways action until … oh it seems like I haven’t had Kings yet, have I? Yes, I’d like a pair of Kings, please … and do you see that “KingLouie” guy sitting over there on the big blind? Yeah, the one with more chips than me … could you please send him a pair of Tens with my compliments? Great! Oh wait wait … just to really make things perfect, could you find the same idiot from the last Ace-Jack hand who is now a short stack after I spanked him with my Queens, the guy on my right? Yeah that’s him … give him an Ace-Three when the blinds are about to hit him so that he’ll feel compelled to shove, I can pretend to think for a while and then just flat call, setting up KingLouie perfectly to Isolate-Squeeze-Shove with his Tens! That’ll play out perfectly, poker-bartender, keep the change! No Ace or Ten anywhere and my Kings hold up to knock out the short stack, cripple KingLouie and propel me into 3rd chip position with 10 players left and five of us winning $8,500 prize packages.

I can almost smell the suntan lotion and tropical drinks…

I stumble pretty badly with a pair of nines after we boil down to the final table. I re-raise preflop (probably a mistake) but feel OK about it when the flop comes 3-3-4. But when I bet the flop and get shoved I’m not feeling so good. I make the painful fold and the guy is kind enough to flash me his Kings, letting me salvage a little pride. I’ve blundered off almost half my chips – from 37000 to 21000, leaving me 6th out of 9.

We play forever with the full 9 players and I don’t make any headway … I’m under 20k, I’m over 20k, but no real progress and no big crashes. We finally lose a player but hover for another eternity at 8 players, and I still can’t get anything going, in fact I can’t get back over 20k, bouncing between 15k and 18k, still 6th out of the 8 and well below average chip stack.

Finally I get back to my bread and butter when I pick up Queens under the gun and get one guy calling my raise. He doesn’t call on the raggedy Turn but that’s fine – at least I’m back up to 24000 and have a little room for patience (blinds 500-1000, ante 100).

After all that time 9-handed and 8-handed we blow away two players in two hands … that’s the good news. The bad news is that they were the only two shorter stacks than me, so we’re firmly on the $8,500 bubble and I’m firmly bringing up the rear (I’m “LRH”):

Seat 1 - ROCK3656 (33,550 in chips)
Seat 4 - ROLLEMM (29,291 in chips)
Seat 5 - MBORCH (48,682 in chips)
Seat 7 - NEMCAR (38,369 in chips)
Seat 8 - CURMUDGUN1 (66,633 in chips)
Seat 9 - LRH (20,475 in chips)

But there’s something strangely not-so-bad about this spot for me. I’m in last place, which sucks, but on the other hand there’s not much temptation for me to just wait for someone else to bust out. And I have enough chips to deal crippling blows to anyone except the chip leader, and he’s perfectly seated on my right. All the others can just nervously watch and hope for someone else to do the dirty work of knocking me out while I keep sneaking in and eating their lunches. This works pretty well for a while, with a mix of standard raises and shoves from me until I get a little too fancy with an ill-advised continuation bet and get spanked, leaving me in even worse shape:

Seat 1 - ROCK3656 (32,850 in chips)
Seat 4 - ROLLEMM (32,041 in chips)
Seat 5 - MBORCH (54,532 in chips)
Seat 7 - NEMCAR (40,819 in chips)
Seat 8 - CURMUDGUN1 (61,383 in chips)
Seat 9 - LRH (15,375 in chips)

Now things are looking a bit dire once again, but again my job is pretty easy here. The two guys on my left are desperate not to tangle with me, the chip leader can pretty much take a nap (and keeps giving me walks in the big blind which makes me want to give him a big slobbery kiss), and the other two could think about messing with me but would far prefer to let the other po’ folks do it for them.

So I attack and attack and attack, staying out of the way if anyone comes in ahead of me and occasionally letting a trashy hand go by, but mostly just attacking. I get a scary moment when the big stack min-raises and I have to re-shove with Queens (yep, one more time) but he doesn’t even make me sweat a little as he insta-folds.

I pull up from the rear to the point where I’m nipping at the heels of the other two short-stacks, and then the fireworks begin. I’ll let you watch the end … I think this video is about 6 minutes long, but the last half is just chatter after the tournament ended.

Huge On The Bubble

(let me know if you have trouble watching the video – you may have to download the latest Adobe Flash Player plugin to make it work properly)