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A good Sunday
Monday, March 10, 2008 I entered four tournaments yesterday. First was the $500 buy-in main event of the Bodog Poker Open. I was stunned at how good the structure was for this thing. They started us with 500 blinds and the levels were 20 minutes long. I check-raised the flop and then bluffed the turn early (and lost), and ran top two into bottom set (and lost), and still had sixty percent of my starting stack two hours in. Eventually I ran KQs into AK blind-on-blind and busted. I actually could've thought about folding. I opened for 3 and the big blind moved in for about 28 if I recall correctly. Nah, who am I kidding--I'm never folding KQs blind-on-blind for those stack sizes. I "played" the $535 WSOP super satellite on FTP next. I say "played" because I was the first out. On hand number one, I thought AK might be a pretty good hand on the J86AA board. But my opponent liked his sixes full better. With starting stacks of 150 blinds, I didn't have any way to avoid going broke (in my opinion), and busted. Stars started at 5:30 p.m. eastern because apparently they can't figure out daylight savings time. I got ahold of a few chips, and then I got in position to make a serious run when a guy just handed me 147,000 more. With blinds of 1500-3000 and some tiny ante, UTG min-raised. I called in the small blind with 44. By the way, we were literally on the bubble, and playing hand-for-hand. The big blind made it 12k more. UTG folded. I had 159k left and my opponent had me covered. I believe we were the two biggest stacks at the table. I called. The flop came ace-high. Check-check. The turn was (obviously, since I'm writing about it) a four. I led out for 29k. My opponent min-raised to 58k. I was suspicious of three aces, but not nearly suspicious enough to slow down, and I moved in for 89k more. My opponent called like a shot and I actually thought I was toast. But no, he turned over...two kings????!!!!! The poor guy clearly didn't know much about poker to lose so many chips in that fashion, but I'll never turn down a gift. As we entered the money, I was the tournament's chip leader. While this was going on, I was also making a run in the FTP tournament. In fact, I was in second place in chips with 190 players left. But then I lost with two tens to two fours (all-in preflop) and that dropped me back to merely a very good stack. A few orbits later I lost with QQ to AK and was left with less than one blind and busted on the next hand. If I'd won that flip I would've been top five in chips again, but oh well. It was on to Stars. I stayed right around 340k for a long while after the big hand on Stars, not finding any good spots to put my chips in play. Eventually the blinds got big and I was able to chip up quite nicely to about 1 mil. I did that partially by winning a showdown with A6 against A2s. It was especially lucky, since my opponent flopped a flush draw! I then got it to 2 mil when I beat two sevens with my two kings. But I lost three medium pots against short stacks. I had the worst hand every time, but not usually by much. And I stole enough that I still had 1.6 mil when I ran QQ into KK and lost. Left with .27 blinds, I busted on the next hand. I finished 35th out of 7,349, which isn't too shabby, but in my opinion should be worth more than 17 buy-ins. The guy who beat my QQ with his KK ended up winning the tournament. It's actually kind of sick. I had clearly a good Sunday of tournaments, but I made a profit of only $2,538. Given that the buy-ins totaled $1,466, I didn't really exceed expectation by that much. I'm sure I'm spitting into the wind here, but I'd love it if online sites only paid ten percent of the field, and took the money they're currently paying out to the bottom places and save it for the people who finish in the top 0.5% or so. This pay structure would better suit the styles of anyone playing good tournament strategy. My final table video from the FTOPS event will be released on stoxpoker.com this week. At that point, I'll share some of the hands from that tournament in this space. Best of luck if you're playing cards this week.  September 2004 | October 2004 | December 2004 | January 2005 | February 2005 | March 2005 | April 2005 | May 2005 | June 2005 | July 2005 | August 2005 | September 2005 | October 2005 | November 2005 | December 2005 | January 2006 | February 2006 | March 2006 | April 2006 | May 2006 | June 2006 | July 2006 | August 2006 | September 2006 | October 2006 | December 2006 | January 2007 | April 2007 | May 2007 | June 2007 | July 2007 | October 2007 | January 2008 | February 2008 | March 2008 | |
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© 2004-2006 by Matt Matros | All Rights Reserved |
