Monday, July 17, 2006
Life is good when you manage to enter a $7.50 tournament and avoid enough bad beats to make a final table. In this one I somehow became the donkey myself. Going into the final table I was the short stack and I mean SHORT STACK! Blinds were 200/400 and I had 1300 chips. The average stack was in the ball park of 40,000.
I was so lucky to start in the BB with 6 3 off. I just couldn' muster the courage to move all in so I folded to a raise. Then the SB came but before it came to me two players were already all in. I folded again and was left with about 575 chips.
With 8 players remaining I moved in with J 9 suited. Obviously, I received a couple callers. So it was 3 way action. I was the luckiest I've been in a long time when I flopped a flush and tripled my stack. Keep in mind this gave me around 2K vs an average of 40K.
Somehow I managed to survive til the final 4. My cards were hot and I was even with everyone. I moved in with AK and got called by the chip leader with AQ so next thing you know I was the new leader. Things were all me from there on.
Going into heads up play I had 340,000 chips vs a 65,000 chip stack! Guess what, I lost. It was one top pair after another losing to 2 smaller pair or top pair plus better kicker. Before you know it I had 195,000 chips vs 210,000. It was soon over.
I was dealt KQ suited while my opponent was dealt 44. I raised 5x the blind; he called. Flop came K Q 4. I would say this was just meant to be. I tried to slow play putting in a minimum bet. BINGO! He moved all in. I couldn't have been happier to call. Oops. Ok, I held my breath praying for a king or queen on the turn or river to bail me out but it just didn't happen. 2nd place paid $350 while first paid $550. That sucked to lose but a $350 return for 7 bucks isn't bad.
