HugePoker

I busted out of the main event in Aruba today, 6.5 hours into day 1. It was a rough day, at a particularly tough table, including Matt Graham, online and live poker star with two WSOP bracelets (who I busted out of the tournament, but he was pretty short-stacked by then so it didn’t help me all that much). I ran badly in various ways, not suffering any terrible bad beats but running into several “coolers”, not getting paid off all that well when I hit big hands, and in the end busting out on a massive coinflip for 18,000 chips.

I turned the nut flush as another guy turned a full house.

I hit top pair-top kicker against middle set, and got into more trouble when I turned top-two pair, but managed to fold to a raise on the turn in a massive 3-way pot.

It seemed like I had my continuation bets raised or checkraised every time I was making a move, and got little or no action when I nailed the flop.

In the end I got all my money in on a coinflip with AK against JJ, and lost the coinflip. I’m back and forth in my brain about whether or not I overplayed the hand. I raised, he reraised big, and I shoved … I correctly assessed that he wouldn’t make that strong a move with AA or KK, which were the only hands way ahead of me, but maybe I should have preserved my chips and waited for a better spot.

But my main event is done. There are more tournaments at the Radisson that I might play, but my primary focus shifts to the wacky Holiday Inn tournament, qualifiers for which start tomorrow night. I don’t know if I’ll have wifi access to be able to twitter updates from there, and that tournament is so weird that daily blog updates probably make more sense anyway. One way or the other I’ll let you know what’s going on…

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