Personally, I like Final Table’s $20K tournaments. Heard some grumbling from a player at Friday night’s $20K about the structure being crappy, but I like it better than comparable games in town. Final Table has maintained the 25/50 level, so with a 10K stack it starts 200BB deep instead of just 150. After the first break, there are three rounds with antes of 25, 50, and 75 before those yellow chips come off the table. It does play rather short in the later stages, but that’s a problem with most tournaments of more than 100 entries that play down in a single day.

They’ve been pretty good for me, as well. Over the past three years, I’ve played 28 of them, cashed in 5 (just under 18% ITM). I’ve done five rebuys, which brings the actual ITM down to 15% (none of the cashes came after a rebuy) and I made three final tables in events with between 120 to 200 entries.

The week had gotten off to a decent start, with a chance to play HU with my friend David Long after playing down a single-table PLO8 tournament at Portland Players Club. Nothing else, but it was my first HU for a while—tournaments here tend to chop at two or three players minimum—and a long time for live PLO8.

The $20K also kicked off well. I was seated at Final Table’s final table (on a dais with a surrounding fence), on the other end from Steve Myers, a sort of poker colleague, for the first four hours. The guy on my right drew to a straight flush against a full house, then flopped quad kings (and got Steve to pay him off) in the first three levels, but was gone by the time the table broke with just under half the field (133 entries and 26 re-entries) remaining. I was cruising along with about half again the average stack.

Twenty minutes later, things had changed. I’d 3-bet [kd qd] and gotten a fold when I was on the button, then picked up exactly the same cards on the next hand and shoved over a min-raise from the button. Who had [kx kx]. I plummeted down to 11K. At least I got two pair.

A couple of lucky shoves got fold, even with my 5BB stack, and I got up to 33K before the cards started slipping away and I drifted back down to 15K over the next hour.

A three-way hand with me shoving [9x 9x] put me back near average at 65K when I flopped a set against a shorter stack with [8x 8x] and a big stack who called with [3x 3x] (and also made a set on the river). We were down to four tables five hours and twenty minutes in, and Steve got moved to my new table after his broke (though he was only there for about five minutes before a balance moved him again). Then we picked up Angela Jordison, who was riding a short stack.

Twenty places paid, with positions 18-20 paying $160, essentially a bubble payment, since that’s the cost of the door fee, a buyin, and an addon. I was up to 70K by the time we hit three tables six hours into the tournament, and we lost four more in the next twenty-five minutes, putting us within grasp of the money. I had 90K, which was about 11BB.

And here’s where things went horribly wrong. I was on the big blind at 4K/8K with a 1K ante in seat 9. It was the last hand of the level, with blinds going to 5K/10K/1K on my small blind. It was seven-handed, seats 1 and 2 had large stacks (actually, Angela Strode-Haugen—one of the honchos at Final Table—had an enormous stack), seat 3 was comfy. Angela Jordison had chipped up a bit from the short stack she’d had coming to the table with some aggressive plays—a few minutes earlier I’d cold-folded [ad qd] preflop to a 3-bet shove from her that would have cost me most of my stack if I’d lost. Seat 6 was on the button with a stack shorter than mine, and seat 8—the guy who had kings when I’d lost most of my stack—had drifted back down to my level, as well. Seat 6 had also been aggressive, which had made it a bit difficult for me as the last of the small stacks to act to find a good spot. I had just asked the TD about whether we’d be going hand-for-hand (something Final Table is just starting to implement on the bubble). We are down to the stone cold bubble. The first four players fold. Short-stacked seat 6 shoves. Seat 8 in the small vlind folds. I have [ad qd] again. I’m almost certainly ahead in this situation, a knockout puts us in the money and essentially doubles me up to 150% of average stack. So I call, he has [kx jx], a king flops (or maybe turns, the sequence doesn’t matter in this case), and I’m busted down to 18K.

I fold [jx 3x]—what would have been the winning hand—on my small blind, then with just over 1BB shove with whatever doesn’t win against the two big stacks in the blinds. Not a pleasant way to go.

Six hours and fifty minutes. 21st of 159 entries.