Hand 130: Where Tournaments Go to Die

Logarithmic chart comparison of two tournamentsJust idly comparing chip counts of a couple of tournaments. The blue line is from a July Full Tilt $5 re-buy game with a $2K prize pool where I took second place (after a heads-up chop deal) and the red line is from the $2 PokerStars tournament I cashed in yesterday.

Thought it was just interesting how the two trajectories were more or less congruent until about the 130th hand. In July, I caught a Jh on the river on hand 130 to turn my JdTs into two pair and beat an all-in AdAc. Last night it was my aces on hand 131 that were beat by a set of queens. Aces, hand 130 (ten times thirteen!). I’ll just be keeping my eye out for a pattern.

Midnight Madness didn’t go any better tonight. Out in 1,275th place. The guy following me (VPIP of 50%) had been going all-in with close to the starting chip level far more regularly than was warranted. There were four players in at 200 chips to the flop. 4d6d7d came out and it was checked around to Mr. All-In who proceeded to do it yet again. The two players ahead of me folded. I had the all-in covered and AcQc in my hand. As I suspected, when his cards flopped, he was holding nothing better than Jc9c and I had him beat until the 9s showed up in the river. I managed to squeak back up to 1,100 before I was eliminated. He ended up going out before I did even with the double up. Playing the tournament did release a $10 bonus, though, so it was almost a freeroll.

Just Walk Away

Lord Humungus

The Ayotollah of Rock-n-Rolla

I’m playing a $3K guarantee tournament on PokerStars which was going pretty well early on. I was in the chip lead for about a half hour, got knocked to about half my max, then managed to climb back up over it (by which time that figure was nowhere near the lead). Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior was on the TV. I picked up AdAs in the cutoff position with more then 22K in chips (the most at the table by 6K) with the blinds at 200/400 and raised the single caller—the second-largest stack—to 1,500. He called.

Onscreen, the Humungus was just starting into his speech to the encampment in the desert, exhorting them to “Just walk away.” There are times when you get distracted from the game by having something on in the background but this is a time when I really should have been looking for enlightenment from the movies. The flop was QdQc7d and my opponent went all-in for more than 14K after I raised 750. That should be a clue that he’s representing a queen in his hand, right? But I called it and got brought down to 6K when he showed QhJc and no aces showed up on the turn or river.

I managed to get back up to 15K shortly thereafter, lost most of that, and climbed back to 7.5K before going out 140th out of about 1,900. In the money but not much of it.

The other useful poker advice from that movie is Wez’s: “Go! Go! Go!”