Freezeout

Aces Players Club $60 Freezeout (7,000 chips)

I’ve gotten increasingly lax about taking notes on my live games, which is really too bad because this tournament represented the biggest single cash I’ve ever had (though only in absolute terms, not in profit or ROI). I’d gone down in flames in the $10K just a couple days before and my profit for the month had taken a beating; I’d lost seven straight tournaments (as well as a satellite and a shootout buy-in). After being up half a grand after the two early May wins, I was back where I’d started.

Somehow, though, the evening went reasonably well. I was down below starting stack at one point early on but managed to keep climbing and made it to the final table with more than 40K in chips. There was a prize pool of $1,740, with 5 places paying. A rather hyperactive young guy was jumping up and down in his seat whining for a chop but the old guy at the table, R, wouldn’t have any of it. The kid’s friends started in as the match dragged on and it seemed to just made R dig his heels in even more.

I hacked down a couple of the last players and as we moved into three-handed play in the fourth hour I had more than half the chips in play, with 105,000. The kid was on the light side, still agitating for a chop. I tried to let them hack at each other as much as possible—the blinds were getting to the point where they had to take some sort of action—and eventually R took the kid out.

He proposed a chop at that point—at least I think he did it was a bit difficult to tell—but I was feeling confident I could whittle away at him. I should have taken count of my chips better, though, because were were more evenly-matched than I realized. Eventually, we got to a situation where he called a re-raise all-in and I called with [kx jx], only to have him flip [ax qx]. We both paired on the board, but his was better than mine and I was knocked down to about 35K, about a 1:5 disadvantage. I managed to crawl back up to 80K, but it was tough going with blinds at 5K/10K and I eventually gave busted out in second place about the same time the 10PM Turbo tournament was ending.

4.5 hours. Finished 2nd of 29 players. +275% ROI (including buy-in, door, tip).

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