I played in a small buy-in multi on UB tonight and placed third out of 550. I really like their small guaranteed tournies – the field is weak and generally smaller than Party or Stars, making for nice overlays (like today). I did play well, but I also won more than my share of coin flips and had a few memorable suckouts as well. Hey, you can’t get far in tournies without some luck, right?
One thing I need to be better about when playing tournies is minimizing distractions. During a key hand with AK, the phone rang and I answered it. It was my father, asking me all these questions about his iPod and how to configure it just how he wants it. He’s describing all the details of his iTunes interface to me while I’m getting reraised with AK in my hand. I ended up having a knee-jerk reaction and shoving all my chips in. Luckily the raiser, who had KK and won the hand, had only half as many chips as I did going in, and I got some big hands and built my stack again right away. But I didn’t even look at the stacks before shoving my chips, and all because I was distracted.
On another hand, the dreaded misclick struck. UB’s buttons are too small! I meant to check in the BB with 35 of hearts, but ended up clicking “min raise.” Heads up against the small blind, the flop came 4h 6h 9x. Small blind shoves all – in for about one and a half times the pot and now I’m stuck because of my “internet fingers.” Needless to say neither my flush nor my gutshot came through, and the small blind showed A6 for a set of sixes by the river.
Fortunately, I continued to be slammed by the deck and built my stack up to a formidable size once again. I caught every break!
We got down to three players when I was dealt QQ in the small blind. Button folds, I raise it up. Big blind reraises me. He has me covered by about 100,000 chips with 6K/12K blinds. I move in, he calls with 88. Unfortunately I’ve used up all my luck because an 8 comes on the river and I’m out in 3rd place. With that dude’s chips I would have been almost a lock for first place. Instead I’m out of the action but very satisfied with the way I played. Plus, at least the difference in prize money was only a few hundred, unlike a similar suckout situation a few weeks ago at the WPT event in Aruba, where Layne Flack got rivered by Eric Brenes and lost just a little bit more than that…
Happy with my third place (which should have been first….). I think I’ll start a post with all my “major” tourney wins. Look for that soon. It’s sure to be thrilling!
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