November 28, 2008

  • Final Days 7, 8, & 9 - Deepstack Main Event

     

           Sorry for not updating my blog for the past couple days, been pretty busy the last few days in Vegas and coming back home.  It's probably evident that the Main Event didn't work out too well for me.  I built my stack up almost flawlessly from the starting stack of 20k in chips and peaked at 44k in chips approaching the dinner break.  About the second level of the tournament a professional poker player that goes by the name Michael Binger sat exactly on my right.  If you don't know who he is, he took 3rd place in the Main Event 2006, the year Jamie Gold won it, he took home an amazing $4M (yes, that's million).  I didn't get into any real key hands with him because he was a pretty tight nit player and plus our table was later broken.  I also saw JJ Lou playing in another table and heard that Todd Brunson was also in the field.  The structure for this tournament was awesome, 90 minute levels!  One of the best structured tournaments I've played in non-WSOP.  I came back from the dinner break and that's where things started to go really sour.  Got into some key pots with some of my good draws and ended up blanking off in a lot of them which dwindled my stack down to about 18k in chips.  After a raise in middle position and two callers, I put a pretty fatty squeeze play committing half my stack.  The original raiser folded but one of the two callers, who has been the table bully ever since he got moved to my table, figured me on a squeeze and decided to put me all-in since he had me way covered.    I wasn't too happy about the all-in and took me a while to decide if I wanted to put my $2500 buy-in tournament at stake.  I factored in that it was the last level before Day 1 ended and told myself that I rather double up and have a decent stack going into Day 2 or get busted with my semi-shortstack and not even bother coming back for Day 2.  So I ended up making the call and was happy to see that I was a slight favorite when he flipped over KQo vs. my AJs.  He ended up flopping and king and rivering another one for trips and that was the end of my tournament.  I wasn't too bothered about getting knocked out in this situation because 1) I still got my chips in while I was ahead, 2)  I was free-rollin since I made the final table in the $540 tournament, and 3) I really believe this was a good spot to either double up or not even bother coming back for Day 2.

           The last two days was comrpised of me playing long sessions of $2-$5 cash game and spending some last minute time with my good friends out there in Vegas.  I flew back home Tuesday night and have been busy catching up on some errands ever since.  I don't plan on jumping right back into online tournament play because of some other priorities I need to take care of, so I will be back in full effect starting Dec. 1st.  For now I've been multi-tabling $2-$4 ring games online to keep up with my points for Ironman status.  I have a small sample size in $2-$4 but am doing quite well I would say.  Unfortunately, my time off tournament play has dropped my ranking on OPR (official poker rankings) and in the TLB (Tournament Leader Board) but I can sacrifice a few spots for Nov.  and prepare to tear it up in Dec..  Happy Thanksgiving all!