Disappointment...and Relief

Well, I entered the DADI Shorthanded tourney last night without very high expectations. With the extent of my shorthanded play being at various stages of SNGs, I didn’t have a lot of experience. Regardless, I knew I would have fun and hoped for the best. Once again, being in a blogger tourney meant meeting some new people. I joined up with mowenumdown, gcox25, surflexus, and many others in a yahoo conference thanks to an invite from Tripjax. Nice to meet you all and thanks for the welcome. BTW, if you are looking for an NCAA pool to enter, I think I found one.

As far as the tourney, I started off with SteelerJosh, Jhartness, HCR100 (?), and Boobielover. I think that was the lineup anyway. I was happy to be up a little bit after the first level after playing few hands and catching a couple cards along the way. I ended up holding my own for a while and then Sir Waffles entered the scene. I think my affiliation sign up with him brought me some good vibes as I got lucky a couple times while he was at the table at first.

I went on a roll at one point where I was catching cards and people were betting into me. They were falling fast. I ended up taking out quite a few people with good cards. I was getting the cards and fat with chips. Hoff and others were railing, and I was feeling good. The tourney had started with 57 people, and with 20 left, I had over 10K in chips and was in first position overall.

At the first break, most of the people in the 45 SNG Challenge were jumping into a $5 tourney. Not wanting to miss the first one, especially with a bunch of bloggers entered, I stupidly distracted myself by joining them. That wasn’t smart. I am not good enough to multi table while I am leading a tourney. I will make a long story short. I busted out of the 45 SNG around 20th place (after putting Trip out when I hit a set of 5s vs his bullets, sorry dude).

As I was donking it up in the SNG, my luck started to change quickly in the DADI tourney also. I have to go through the hand histories to see exactly what happened, but let’s just say, I SUCK! After, what I remember as 3 or 4 coin flip hands (not my last push which was 8s vs As), I was OUT IN 15th! I probably made some really bad calls, especially with the chip lead. Once I lost the first big one, I may have panicked and got a little too aggressive. Not sure, Sir, any idea what the hell happened there? As Sir Waffles so nicely typed, after I lost the 3rd or 4th hand in a row that I played, “First to worst”. Well said, sir. Once I have a chance to look at the histories, I will try and figure out the carnage. The bottom line was, I was in a great position to make my first blogger tourney final table and I blew it.

So that was the disappointment section of our broadcast. Now onto the relief portion. As I said before, the 45 SNG Challenge started last night, albeit inauspiciously for me. After betting bounced so forcefully from the DADI, I decided to take another shot at a 45. Most of the others had already, smartly, retired for the evening, as it was about 11 or so I think. Since noone else was playing one, I decided to conserve my bankroll and play a $1 45 and hope for the best.

I don’t remember a lot of the details of this one, but I came in 2nd. A couple things that I do remember though. When I got a lot of chips, I sat back and let the others beat the crap out of each other. I was an opportunistic stealing machine. When it got to the final table, I was the chip leader by a very slim margin over another dude.

Funny side note here. When I got moved to the final table, one of the players was TBrady 2 SB’s. Being a New Englandah myself, I hovered over his avatar and was surprised to see that he was from my town. We talked a little bit as he repeatedly raised my blinds on steals. He was a younger kid but it turns out he lived real close to me. Anyway, I waiting him out and put him in at the right time.

Once he was gone, I think we were down to 3. I made one bad call to get the short stack back into it, but other than that, played patient and aggressive. The other big stack was playing well but tried to steal one too many times against the smallest stack. It was a rough call but the smaller stack crippled him, and he was gone a few hands later.

Heads up, it didn’t last long, as I was down about 3-1 in chips and I pushed with A4o. He called with KQ and hit the flop. I didn’t improve and was done in 2nd.

Although I was hoping to win it, I was just relieved that I had a high finish. Actually, I was just happy to get some points toward the challenge and not get shut out through the thing. I had played about 5 or 6 of these prior to the challenge starting and didn’t get closer than 16th in any of the tune-ups. Good luck all. I will be on the 45 SNG tables tonight.