Sunday Million

I decided to play some tournaments on Sunday as supposed to grinding it out on the limit cash tables. I have been playing pretty well and I have a decent T$ BR from satellites in the past few weeks.

I donked out of a couple of the rebuy sats early on in the day. I seem to do much better in the $3R with normal blind structures than the $11R turbo’s which are a bit of a crapshoot, even if they do offer far more seats.

Since Stars were offering a $100 50% bonus to those playing in the Million this week, I decided I needed no further excuses to play. I also got involved in the worlds biggest shared prizepool.* 15 players from the ITH forum decided to join in the pool, each donating 20% of their winnings.

The tournament took to a slow start for me and I got wrapped up in a horrible pot early on and went from my 2500 starting stack to around 1k in chips. I had an OESD and flush draw on the flop, needless to say neither hit. Just before the first break I picked up AA in MP and an AKx flop had lots of action from the two other remaining players.

Just after the break I had a rush of good hands, resulting in an all-in on the flop from TPTK when I held the nut straight. I went card dead for a while after this. I got moved 3 times in the second hour too, and started after the 2nd break with a healthy stack but desperately needing some cards.

My next big hand I doubled to about 30k with AQs after hitting a flush on the river. At this point I was sitting 10th overall with about 2700 left. I floated around in the top 30 for a while before dipping out after loosing a couple of smallish pots and some failed steals.

I was stealing quite effectively after this. My table had a few good players but I felt quite comfortable. I got moved for what would be the last time in the tournament to a much more active table. My steal attempts were sometimes getting rasied and re-raised by the time they got back to me so I tightened up a bit and picked my spots more carefully. I got up to about 40k in chips as the blinds started to get scary for most at my table. I managed to maintain my stack for a while and take advantage of a few smaller stacks after the bubble burst.

After the second money level I went absolutely card dead again and no longer had the stack to steal properly without putting myself at risk. I slowly ground down to about 25k when I got a free run with J5 in the BB. The flop Came down J89 all of hearts and I held the 5h. I raised and was re-raised all in by a big stack at the table. I had a fealing I was already beat, but if I won the hand I was back up to avg stack, and folding left me needing to push very soon.

My opponent flipped the straight, no miricale cards for me and I busted in 313/5884 for just over $700.

Not a bad showing for my first outing in the million and I’m sure it won’t be my last. I made just under a $100 contribution to the ITH pool which got to something like $350 from the 3 players that cashed.

*may not be true