So, my Friday night tournament started out great with a double up the second hand dealt. With a bunch of limpers I completed the small blind without checking my cards. The flop included 2 spades, and lo and behold I had the Q/7 of spades. Hallelujah!! I bet around $120 into the 120 pot and was raised to $240. The other players folded and I reraised to 540. Keep in mind that our starting chip stack is only $2150. The player called my 3-bet. The turn brought another spade and I shoved. He tanked for a few minutes and finally called, turning over J/9 of spades and drawing dead. Nice start.
I wish that I could say that everything fell into place after that, but twice I raised (KQ, AQ) and was called. Missed flop and folded to big bets. Flopped a set of 5's and won a nice pot, but couldn't get the other player all in. Knocked out the dealer later....I was the only one who had knocked out anyone when our table broke. Moving to another table I met disaster after disaster, folding winners and playing losers. Honestly though, would you call a big bet with A7 and an all in bet? No problem for A/10 to snap QQ but I folded a full house with A/7/7 on the board.
My nemesis Carl came back from a short stack with AK, then knocked me out with another AK on my UTG shove with A9. The board paired jacks, so I had lots of outs as the board pairing again gives us a chop, but no. Player down.
On a more positive note, playing online after that, I advanced to step 7 in my quest on Cardplayer website.
Here is a downside of online poker...Playing today for a seat in the Las Vegas deepstack, twice I had the stone cold nuts and my computer froze up. When I reconnected, my hand had been folded! So, I reverted to a "shove or fold" strategy. This works pretty well, and I chip up but also get snapped a couple of times by a very loose player.
Despite having to leave when I was poised to win a seat on level 2, things turned out great. The reason I left early was to collect money for the 4:00 tournament at the American Legion. The regular person was out of town and she asked me to fill in. I wasn't sure if the $100 once a month tournament was a good one for me, but the structure was better than Friday night's with more chips and longer blinds. With 20 entries, the prize pool paid 4 places: $900, 500, 300, 200 and change, with 100 to high hand. Decided to play (other option was to deal and get guaranteed maybe 100). I ran card dead early and late, but had a great middle game, entering the final table with 2nd largest chip stack...another card dead early player caught fire just before the FT. I really just survived, getting AQ snapped by A4 from the giant stack, and losing to 6/6 blind vs. blind with my Q/J suited (flop was 10/K of my suit) had way too many outs to hit...any Q, any J, that is 6, plus any ace (4 more), any 9, 4 more, any diamond, 7 more, giving me a total of 21 outs twice on the flop....Jeesh, and he was low stack on the bubble. How the heck do you miss that many outs? Anyway, discussion was had about paying the bubble, and the huge stack agreed to go along with what everyone else decided. But, one player said no....so no deal. Being the short stack then, was not too happy. The other short guy decided to gamble with Q10 and was called by the big guy with A9 who spiked an ace. Saved some money not paying the bubble. We played until a break and counting chips found that three of us had nearly identical stacks of around 10K, while the chip leader had 57K. I proposed we give him first and chop the balance, which was $330 each, about a $205 profit after buy-in and tip. We all agreed and ended the game after 4 1/2 hours of play.
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