*written from the plane*

 

Well, I’m out of the Bay 101 Shooting Star.  On day one, I played the best tournament poker of my career.  Unfortunately, on day two, I played like absolute garbage for the first half of the day but was then able to come back strong.  Today I’ve had a lot of mixed emotions, which normally I’d say is a bad thing, but I learned a lot and I’m going to use this knowledge to tear it up next time.  It never feels good to write these posts, but I think it’s essential in order to further my quest to continually improve my game.

 

It felt so good to make the money. Counting the bounty I got for busting “The Magician,” I took home a little over $8k in profit. It’s not a huge score but anytime you’re bringing money in it’s a good day. The biggest benefit to me was the confidence boost. After going through a nine month slump, it felt good to finally get that monkey off my back.

 

Day 03 was short and painful. I started by waking up earlier than I did yesterday, so I got up at 8:30am.  I got ready for the day, talked with Thomas about some playing strategy, listened to some music, stretched, and ran circles around my hotel.  I then had another strategy talk with Nappy and grabbed a quick breakfast.  When I arrived at the casino I was ready to play some awesome poker.

 

One of the first hands of the day John Phan raised first position (playing six handed) and got called two seats behind by the table chip leader.  In the big blind I picked up a 9d,Td and flat called the additional 5,000.  Blinds were 1,500/3,000/500 ante at this point and I started with a 137,000 stack.  The flop came Kh, 9h, 5.  I thought for a while about what to do and ultimately decided to check.  The other two checked as well.  The turn brought an off suit 3 and I decided to bet 10,000 which was a fairly small bet.  I like betting out here, but I think in retrospect I should have made a large bet to force someone to pick up a hand if they want to re-raise me.  Even a king would likely flat call and then I could possibly suck out with a 9 or a T on the river and win a big pot.  Anyway, John re-raised my bet to 45,000 and although I wasn’t convinced he was that strong here I decided the reward wasn’t worth the risk and I folded.

 

Two hands later the chip leader is now under the gun (UTG) and he raises to 9,500.  It folds to me and I look down and see A,K.  After that first pot, I now have around 115,000.  My game plan coming in was to try and trap with A,K to possibly get a squeeze play from John, so I decided to call.  I looked over at the raise and decided to match what he put out.  I grabbed two pink (5,000 chip), four blue (1,000), and one yellow (500).  For those of you who are good at math, you’ve probably realized that I put out too much and therein lies a problem.  The floor was called over and ruled that since the 9,500 raise was a raise of 6,500 on the big blind that in order for my motion to be a re-raise it had to be at least half the initial raise.  This meant that my raise had to be at least 3,250 to make it legit.  Well, for those of you who are bad at math, my 14,500 was at least 3,250 more than the initial 9,500, so it was ruled a re-raise and I had to make the minimum allowable re-raise which was 6,500 on top of the initial 9,500.

 

The result is that I had to make it 16,000.  UTG now makes the obligatory re-raise because he knows that I most likely made an honest mistake (which I did).  He re-re-raises 15,000 more, so now he has 41,000 out there, which is perfect because now I can go all-in and get great fold equity and even if he does call I should be way ahead of his range because he has no clue that I’m flatting with A,K preflop.  He called, which obviously made me happy that I might be getting it all-in with a dominant hand.  However, excitement soon turned to dread as A,A was then flipped over in front of me.

 

When the flop came a bland Q high there was no excitement of a suckout to be had and I shook everyone’s hand and made my exit.  I will admit that I was extremely upset with myself for making this “misclick” because it resulted in me exiting the tournament.  Had I just called, as intended, I could have gotten away from the hand postflop.  I hugged my family and had nothing to say, other than “What can you do?”  I felt really bad because my dad had just flown in to see me play and really didn’t get to see much action, but se la vi.

 

On my walk home I started to analyze the situation a little more and became increasingly excited.  I try to learn at least one thing from every tournament I play in so that I can be that much better the next time.  I was thinking about what I can learn from this tournament and two things came to mind. The first being preparation.  On the second day of play I slept terribly.  I woke up at 5:30am because the air conditioning unit in the room decided to randomly start blasting freezing air on me.  I finally figured out how to turn the thing off and went back to bed.  Then I woke up at 9:30 and there wasn’t enough time to eat breakfast. I was in a rush to get to the casino, and my iPhone was out of batteries, so I had no phone or music.  I started out the day very badly and the way the day went followed suit.  The following night I turned off the A/C unit and got up two hours before the tournament instead of just one.  I was super excited and ready to play and that’s the mindset I need to be in.

 

The other thing I learned was adding the “accidental misclick” to my repertoire.  Although it was a genuine misclick during the hand, I believe that if you were to run that scenario out a hundred times that I would be in great shape in terms of EV.  The fact that I don’t want to just make a big re-raise and only get into an all-in as a likely coin flip and my stack size made it quite possibly the optimal way to play the hand.  The facts were that I got the guy to put in 41k preflop, which would normally leave me with plenty of fold equity if he has nothing (which is ideal because A,K isn’t a huge favorite over a random hand) and he will gladly get it in with hands that I have dominated, such as an A,Q or K,Q because it looks like I either might have a low to mid pair or a suited connector.  Most players will re-raise in a spot where it looks like your opponent accidentally re-raised with the intention of calling and that is what you can take advantage of at the table.

 

A lot of people might consider this a dirty angle shoot, but my take on any situation like this is that if it’s within the rules, then it’s fine.  If you know how someone will react to a certain situation and you use that against them, then I think that is just owning them, rather than playing dirty.  Anyway, after thinking about the situation and talking it over with Thomas, I felt much better and decided to get it out on paper so that I didn’t have it looming inside.

 

Right now I just can’t wait to get back on the felt, and although I was planning on not playing another tournament for a while I might have to change my plans because I feel unstoppable right now and another big score is just around the corner.  Wish me luck!