The other night I decided to try my hands at some bigger tournaments, field sizes not buy ins, on full tilt. I loaded up a few including a $3 turbo, $5 knockout, $3 rebuy, and the daily dollar. Was grinding away steady, but something magical started to happen in the knockout. I found myself building a huge stack early as people were just giving me chips, although my cards were really hot too. There were 566 entrants when late registration was over and I just kept building my stack and knocking out people in the process. Was a top five stack for most of it when I started to slide off as the cards cooled down and I felt it was time to slow down a little bit. Well after that I picked up pocket kings being about 15-20th in chips and the other top twenty stack at the table decided to defend against my raise. There were probably about 200 people left at this point so it was definitely two huge stacks playing against each other. Well somehow we found ourselves playing the biggest pot of the tourney at that point and I ended up knocking him out with my trips on the river like the luckbox I am. He had a pair of aces after all. From there it looked like I was just going to dominate as I just kept running over the table playing great deepstack small ball poker. I was up over 20k chips against the second place player cruising into the money which 54 people got paid. That's about when things came to a standstill though and I ended up doubling up about every short stack at the table with what I felt were reasonable calls given the situations and odds. Granted I was gambling a bit, but I suppose I should have given them more credit for having tighter ranges close to the bubble. I soon found myself outside the top ten again and was determined to turn it around and make the final table and win! Well, there was one huge losing player at my table who kept making these off the wall huge preflop raises and calling super marginal bets. It was amazing he even made it that far to be honest. So down to two tables and I'm busto in all my other games so I'm focusing on this one only. Donkzilla raises and I reraise with AK suited on the button after there was one other caller to his raise. Well turns out to be a coinflip, but I catch a king and double up to be back in the top five in chips. So far in the field everyone I had sharkscoped were losing players except one who seemed to be fairly decent. Luckily I hadn't tangled with him. So I'm feeling good now cruising getting closer to the final table when I had an epic meltdown and donked all my chips off to someone who I knew was way ahead since he was playing so tight. End up going bust like two hands later to the semi good guy and go out in 11th. Ended up only cashing for $24, when first was $566. With knockouts that was probably more like $40.
Where all this was severely disappointing, I did learn a lot of things going forward. The first thing being more patient short handed. In turn with that ICM considerations should have been of utmost importance to me when I made a foolish call. I had almost 56 players chips, or 10% of the chips and only ended up cashing for about 1% of the prize pool. I know looking back I was trying to force the issue, and that can work when you are dominating a table but not when the stacks are very close in size as they were becoming towards that point. Sometimes hero calls with a t off are ok, but not against someone who has obv been playing tight.
It was really disappointing to bubble the final table after playing so well up to that point, but I will take everything I learned from the experience and move on to play better the next time. I can assure you all out there this is only a taste of the success I am driven to see and will reach another final table soon!
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