This was a $1000 tournament with a great structure, as the other UBOC events have had. It also got over 800 runners, which is more than twice what I predicted. We started with 500 BB stacks, but I managed to blow about half of mine early with a pretty thin value play that backfired.
I potted KQo from EP. BelowAbove called in the CO and the BB called. The BB then led into me for pot on a QJ5 flop. There weren’t any flush draws on the board, so I just called. The turn was an off-suit 9 and he bet about 1/3 of the pot. I was feeling pretty good about my hand but you never know with these clowns, so I just called again. River was a blank and he bet 1/3 pot again. At this point AQ was the only thing I could imagine him having that beat me, or maybe a verrrrrrrrry strangely played AA/KK. I raised about 4x his bet, and he called with AQ. I’m still not sure about that, it may be too thin.
Thanks to the deep starting stacks, I still had well over 100 BB’s when this next hand came up. I raised Ad Ks from early position and got called by some guy and by BA. Flop came As Jc 8s. I had a feeling that BA was going to float a lot of hands on this flop and probably also bluff if it was checked to him. It’s not really a bad thing if he calls, but there are a lot of turns that are going to be tough for me to play, so I decided to check and try to keep the pot smaller and/or conceal my hand. Below did indeed bet, I called, and the other guy folded.
The turn brought a Kc. I checked again, hoping to check-raise, but BA checked behind. The river was a third club, completing a backdoor flush draw. I bet about 230 into a pot of over 500 on the river, hoping to induce either a bluff raise or ‘value raise’ from a worse hand from BA. He did indeed raise, I snap-called, and he showed me 7c Tc that made a running flush.
After that I was pretty short. Eventually there were two limpers for 60, and I made it 300 or so with TT. The first limper folded, but the second moved all in for my last 1000. She’d been playing very straightforward, honest poker, and the shove was scary as hell. But had she really limped a big pair behind a limper? Yes, she had, and her KK eliminated me.
Please don’t ask how the rest of my Sunday is going. I just AA < T8s (guy raised like 15% of his stack UTG and flopped an open-ender) for the chiplead in the Stars Second Chance.