Yesterday, after two intense days of playing, cashing, and getting bad-beat out of the $1K bracelet event, I decided to get out of Vegas and go hiking in the Mojave National Preserve, which was fantastic (and not even too crazy-hot - totally under 95 degrees).
I was pretty tired today and decided to play the low-stressed, bite-sized, donkey-filled Wynn tournament. My initial table may have been one of the most idiotic collections of poker players I have ever played with in a more-than-$50 tournament (the Wynn has a $225 buyin). I wouldn’t be surprised if the gentleman on my left had never played a tournament before. All around the table there were constant protocol violations, weird misunderstandings about the rules, players misreading their hands or thinking they won a pot because they didn’t understand that their bottom pair was counterfeited, etc. And as a result of the low caliber of play on the part of my opponents, I … ummmm … went from a starting stack of 10,000 chips to … ummm … well … 4000 chips … by the end of the … ummm … third level. Yeah. Can’t really explain that. Well, maybe I can. I played bad. The idiocy of my table-mates made me not take things very seriously. When I should have been seeing a bunch of cheap flops and waiting for great opportunities to stack someone with a big hand, I was instead splashing around, trying to push people out of hands (?!?) and just generally spewing my chips away. With 4000 chips at 200-400, shoving with 55 seemed pretty natural, and when I won the coinflip against AK, I refocused and tried to identify which players I could exploit in which ways, and I quickly built my stack up to 27,000.
One key lucky hand propelled me to the final table. With 17 players left (we started with 56, and the final 9 would get paid) I called a raise from an active player with KQs in the big blind. The flop came JT4, giving me a straight draw, two overcards, and a backdoor flush draw. This guy seemed to always continuation-bet, and the stack sizes were about right, so I waited for him to bet and checkraised all-in. He hemmed and hawed for a while and I thought maybe he had something like Ace-Ten, which wouldn’t even have me in too bad shape. I was surprised when he called and tabled AA, almost as bad as being up against a set - my overcards weren’t good anymore, and he had two of my straight outs in his hand. Yuck. But the turn brought a little more hope - a spade to give me a flush draw - and the river was a glorious Nine, giving me the straight.
I made it to the final table as one of the three chip leaders, and the poor sod whose Aces I cracked busted out on the tenth place bubble with a zero dollar prize - sorry buddy. I ran into a mishap when one of the chip-leaders rivered me by turning his third pair into trips, which knocked me down to an average stack, where I stayed as players busted out - I won some small pots to keep up with average stack size, but I never got back among the top stacks. By the time we got down to 4-handed, there was one massive chip leader and the other three of us were jockeying back and forth as the co-losers. Peopple started talking about a deal, but they wanted to give the chip leader too much money so I kept vetoing it. I got solidly into last place, but then the blinds went up and I had a perfectly efficient shoving stack, and I definitely understood push-fold dynamics better than these other guys. I shoved myself back into contention, but then another short stack doubled up, and the other one won a nice pot, and I was in last place again. Deal talk persisted, and the others crafted a deal that would give the leader $2800 and the rest of us $1750. That was getting pretty acceptable, but I decided to be a hard-ass and ask for $1800, even though that would require the other two shorts to accept less money than me when they had more chips . One of them wanted to do it, and the other one almost fell for it, but then he dug in his heels and said no - he would have been fine with taking $1725, but he just couldn’t stomach the idea of letting me have more. So we played one more hand, and then the blinds went up, the antes doubled, and I was in the big blind, with the chip leader on my left. All that meant that the deal I tried to stonewall one hand earlier was all of the sudden VERY attractive. They really should have retracted it - all those factors meant that my stack was really not worth as much as theirs, but I think they had had enough of me putting them in difficult spots and feared that I would keep doing it (even though I really wouldn’t have been able to - with the new blinds/antes my M was down to 3 and I was about to take the BB). They totally jumped at it, not even pausing for a moment to think about why I would have changed my tune after just one hand.
So another final table, another nice little score, and another vote of confirmation for the Wynn as the juiciest $200-ish tournament ever.
If I feel well-rested in the morning I’ll be playing Day 1A of the $1K bracelet event. If not I’ll play something else and play Day 1B on Friday. I’ll let you know…
-huge