Short version: I was massive chipleader for nearly all of the second half of the Mookie. I got a fortunate double-up with AQ vs. KK when the poker gods rewarded me for overplaying AQ preflop; my pairs were holding up vs. slightly lower pairs; and I was dodging trouble and making some big stack calls to bust players left and right. By the time we were down to six players left I had 106K in chips; second place stack was about 60K ... but I managed to implode, busting out in fifth place. Playing to win came back to haunt me.
1) I go to the well one too many times with T8s ("the Mookie") and flop bottom two pair in a re-raised pot (I opened and was re-raised another 4 bbs by the small blind). Jordan leads out having flopped top set, I shove, he insta-calls and I relinquish chip lead when I lose the massive 110K-ish pot which would have had me home and cooled out with more than half the chips in play with five players left. Instead, I swap positions with Jordan, who went on to win the tournament, and fell to second place with approximately 60K. Given my chip lead I think this was a defensible call in position with the implied odds and the stack sizes involved (100K and 50-ishK respectively), but hitting two pair here proved disastrous. I was able to invest less than 10% of my stack preflop to call the re-raise and I hit my hand hard enough to continue. Since I put Jordan's re-raising range there at a pretty "honest" top 5-10% of hands, I figured the implied odds were sufficient to see a flop in position.
2) I stabilize and am narrowly in third place behind cardgrrl, who has aggressively been picking on my big blind when it's folded around to her. So I eventually play back at her with Q8dd. She decides she wants to play acey-deucey out of position against my re-raising range. Oookay. We both check on a 9d7h2c flop. The magical 6d falls on the turn and suddenly I have OESFD with some live cards; she leads out for 10K into a ~35K pot and I instantly shove my last 35K in there and she calls. She shows up with the nightmarish A2dd for a mighty bottom pair and my flush outs are dead. Naturally the flush comes in (also completing my straight) and IGH in 5th place. My 21 outs once turned out to be just a dozen: three queens, three eights, and six non-diamond straight outs. (The sad thing is that if a blank falls on the turn, I think I can get her off bottom pair.)
Sigh.
Will try again next week for that ToC seat I suppose.
NB. Oh, and at least I got to say DQB:
2 comments:
Wow - I was wondering what happened to you. You looked to be at the top of your game last night. I was expecting to see you in the final two, but this was a blogger tournament, of course.
I was feeling it, but went card dead at final table and, well, the two hands I posted are pretty self-explanatory. I need to take more lessons from lucko.
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