HugePoker

I don’t often get the opportunity to come into a new day of a tournament as the chip leader at my table - in fact I’m not sure it’s ever happened to me before. To amplify the effect, because I won a few pots at the end of the night last night after they had colored up some of the green (25) chips but before they had colored up all of them, I ended up with an absurd number of green chips, so that not only did I have more chips than everyone else in terms of my chip count, I had probably three times as many physical chips as anyone else, and I speculated that I might be the tournament chip leader in terms of the weight of my stack. When I got to my table about 30 seconds before start time, everyone else had unbagged their chips and stacked them into a small number of neat little piles, but the dealer had just cut my bag open and dumped it in an unholy multi-colored mountain. In front of my seat. I walked up and said “oh, I think that’s me”, and spent the next ten minutes stacking them.

The very first hand I was dealt seemed like an auspicious beginning - guy on my right raises, I have AK in the hijack and reraise, everyone folds. I could almost feel everyone tense up, like “OK, so this is how it’s gonna be”. Unfortunately after that I didn’t pick up a decent hand for a while, so I couldn’t keep them on the ropes (or maybe I’m not quite ballsy enough to do so without a tolerable hand).

It was kind of a funny day, quite a contrast from yesterday … I got involved with a lot of pots, but very rarely played a big pot. I stole blinds, I occasionally 3-bet, I raise-folded, I made a few continuation bets, but I don’t think I played a single hand all day long that involved action on the flop AND on the turn or river. I bounced around between 30K and 40K until we got to the bubble. I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to play bubble terrorist, and after 7 hands od hand-for-hand we were in the money with 324 players remaining, all of us guaranteed to cash for at least $1800.

No big action until the short stack on my right, who had shoved on my big blind twice already, was unfortunate enough to do so a third time when I had AQ. I snap-called, he was live with KT, but an Ace on the turn doomed him - that took me up to 46k.

At the new table things continued in a similar manner, but I had stepped up to the 40k-50k range. And then disaster struck…

An active player in late position open-shoved his 31k stack, and I pretty much snap-called with JJ, believing htat it was nearly inconceivable that he would do that with Queens or better. I was right, he had A6o, and I was in good shape to make a nice jump up to a 75K stack … the 679 flop gave him two more outs but was otherwise acceptable to me … the 5 on the turn added four chop outs (an eight would make a straight on the board for a split pot) … but all of those extra outs were made irrelevant by the Ace on the river. YUCK!!! With that I was crippled, down to exactly 10,000.

On the very next hand another player raised to 5000 and my AK in the small blind was an obvious reshove. He turned over 66, and I lost the coin flip, and just like that in two hands I was gone.

I busted in 158th place out of 3106 players, for a prize of $2,589. Not what I was hoping for at the start of the day, but a WSOP cash is never anything to sneeze at, and this was my first bracelet event cash in a long time, and I might be bummed about how I busted out but I’ll take the $2,589 and not whine about it too much. I believe this result makes me mildly positive for the trip - just in terms of poker, I’m not talking about expenses or anything crazy like that.

Hopefully it’s just the first step.