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