HugePoker

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)