HugePoker

I went to the Tulalip Indian Reservation casino on Sunday to play in what I thought was a satellite for a WPT event coming up in Reno next month. It turned out not to be … well, sort of … they were giving three “seats” into the WPT event to the top three finishers, but in this case a “seat” meant $2500 in cash (which you could use to buy in to the Reno event *if you wanted to*) plus a $1500 travel voucher (which you could use to travel to Reno *if you want* and if you can somehow manage to spend $1500 traveling to *Reno*). So not really a satellite, but instead a regular cash tournament in which they have taken $12,000 out of the prize pool and divided it evenly between 1st, 2nd and 3rd (and in which they’ve collected some extra rake because they certainly didn’t pay $1500 in cash for those travel vouchers). In my defense over not knowing the real terms of the tournament, I can say that at least I figured out what the exact story was within about ten minutes of sitting down, whereas there were players *deep into the final table* who didn’t know and didn’t seem to care what exactly the prizes were, let alone have the faintest clue about how the prize distribution might impact strategy. For a while it looked like this ignorance might have a nasty impact on me, but in the end it worked to my advantage.

$400 buyin, 99 players, ten places paid (with the big extra payout for the top three), $4760+$4000 for first place, very good structure with 25,000 chips to start (!) and 30 minute levels and only a few ugly blind jumps. It took over 12 hours to play down to the end. You might wonder how I know that it took over 12 hours …

I had a very healthy stack with 16 players left, but made a mis-step calling a shorter stack’s shove with 99 when I really should have realized that he was too tight for my call to be good – he had TT and gave me a serious kidney punch. I had a chance to atone for my mistake in a blind vs blind battle with the same player, but he made a bizarre insta-check-raise bluff on the river and I actually folded A7 on an Ace-high board because I couldn’t imagine how he could be bluffing (I bet 25,000 and he shoved for 40,000 more) but he told me when he busted out in 3rd that he had “put me on a weak Ace” and thought I would fold it. I could write several pages about how ridiculous that is, but I won’t.

With 11 players left we agreed that $200 each would be taken out of 1st and 2nd place prizes so that the 11th place finisher would get their $400 back. At that point I was in serious danger of finishing 11th and not much danger of finishing 1st or 2nd, so I was happy with the deal. But very quickly the bubble boy busted and we had our final table. I think I was 9th out of 10 in chips for quite a while, and then 9th of 9, and then 8th of 8, but I kept hanging on.

I must confess that I ran well at the final table, with two mild suckouts and one serious one. The serious one came when I shoved my short stack with ATs and got called by a bigger stack with KK. Two other players immediately announced that they each had folded an Ace, which made my chances pretty slim – I thought I needed a bunch of spades or a couple of Tens to fall, but I wasn’t disappointed with the 89J flop, and the 7 on the river was just glorious.

When we were down to six players I was still short-stacked, and I was eager to do something that might smooth out the payout structure. This is something that players usually are desperate for (and I’m usually rejecting) but these players just didn’t seem to get it that there was such a huge jump from 4th to 3rd prize, plus the old guy on my right had more than 50% of the chips in play. So there was never any deal. There would come another brief moment when I would regret that fact, when we were 4-handed at 5,000-10,000 blinds and I shoved my 90,000 chip stack from the small blind with T9o into the woman in the big blind who had only a few more chips than me. She had been playing tight and decently, and her stack size made her a perfect target, so I would have shoved any two cards. When she paused I got worried, and when she said “I just have to take my chances” I thought she might have something like Ace-Jack (please not Ace-Ten!) or sevens, and when she said “I call” I thought surely I was in trouble. But when she turned over Ten-Eight-suited I was dumbfounded (as in I had found some serious dumb), and when a Nine fell on the flop I was the beneficiary of an inexplicable $4,000 gift. You see that on final tables sometimes (in fact I think it happened this year in the WSOP main event November-Nine-bubble, when already-forgotten-name made the obscenely bad call with KQ) where people have played conservatively and all of the sudden they just hit a wall or get stressed out or burned out and say “I guess I just have to gamble here and hope I get lucky – or at least I can go home and relax”. For those of you who know what ICM is, her call was one of the worst ICM mistakes I have ever seen (well, outside of WSOP main event satellite bubbles, I guess).

So she busted out a hand or two later and we were down to three. I still had fewer chips than the other two, but I quickly changed that. I flopped a set against weird-checkraise-bluff guy and doubled through him, making me the chip leader. When I finally knocked him out I had something like an 8:1 chip lead on the old guy on my right who had formerly had all the chips. I believe it was only the second time in my poker career that I’ve had over a million chips in a live tournament. I knew he didn’t stand much of a chance and in the end he 3-barrel-bluffed me when I was holding QT on a Q98A5 board, and it was over.

12.5 hours, 99 players, 1st place, $4560 plus $2500 plus $1500 travel voucher plus a “Tulalip Casino Poker Tournament Champion” card cover to add to my collection.

There’s a very bizarre coincidence here. It certainly doesn’t happen very often that I (or anyone) win back-to-back live tournaments (with more than a handful of players in them). I’ve posted about it once before in my blog:

2007:
August 15: Roxy’s, 1st of 35, $1360
August 28: Muckleshoot, 1st of 40 (Deb took 2nd), $1200

2011:
August 14: Muckleshoot, 1st of 60, $4200
August 28: Tulalip, 1st of 99, $8500

Weird. But I’ll take it. Hopefully I can continue the Seattle-area live poker streak into September. Muckleshoot has their end-of-Summer series happening September 9-10-11 with $300, $500 and $1000 buyin events, and I’m planning on playing all of them. Josh will be flying in for the event from Florida, so hopefully we can each final-table a couple of them (or I’ll just win all three and keep the streak alive).