5th Place

Two final tables in two days, one live and one online, and I finished 5th in both. I think it has to be possibly the most frustrating place to finish. Wednesday night I played in a local rebuy with just over 100 runners. I was sitting at a little under average after the 1st break when everyone tightened up and went into freezeout mode.

I managed to take advantage of quite a passive table and picked up a few pots early on that allowed me to take a nasty KK vs QQ beat and come through with something resembling a stack. I got back to about average after winning a flip with 4 tables left and pretty much maintained my stack until the final two tables. When we got down to 5 handed on both tables I was 8/10 and maybe had a couple of orbits to double if I was going to stay in contention. At this point someone proposed an utterly ridiculous 10 way chop and although most people didn’t go for it, 3 of the 5 players on my table agreed.

Needless to say I went hyper-aggro and eventually ended up busting the guy in 10th to make it in the money and to the final table sitting 2nd in chips. Due to the nature of the blind structure and the number of chips in play the final table went pretty quick. I was chip leader for all of a few hands, and I think the 4 players who went out before me did so within the first 15 hands of the final table starting.

Five handed I had to back down in a few pots and eventually ended up pushing AK from the SB and getting called by AQ. Flop brings a Q and I’m already half way to the cashier.

Not an amazing performance but it was nice to get 7 or so hours of live tournament poker in. The luckbox who knocked me out went on to win the tournie and didn’t even tip the waitress who had been working on her own and serving him all night.

My other final table came in the Stars $15k last night. I was so tired from the night before that I was convinced I must have made at least some mistakes late on. In reading the HH today I can’t see anything too bad, but I have definitely seen a couple of spots where I probably didn’t extract as many chips from my opponents as I could have which is something I really need to work on. Overall I was happy with my play and it’s a great feeling to make the FT of a tournie with over 2,000 runners and turn a 1.5k stating stack into nearly a million chips.

Nothing else to report except that I have already made tentative plans for Vegas. At the moment I plan to be there from the 5th July (the WSOP ME starts on the 6th) until the 12th, unless of course I manage to go on a sick run and make day 5, at which point I’ll be extending my stay!