The structure on this actually wasn’t quite as deep as I expected in the early-going, but I imagine it gave a lot of play in the later stages while still keeping things moving along at a good clip. It’s a tough balancing act to run a really well-structured tournament for more than 2000 players in a reasonable amount of time, even over two days.
We started super-deep, with 25,000 chips and 25/50 blinds. But blinds doubled to 50/100 and then to 100/200 at the end of the first hour. I still had pretty much my starting 25K when I raised Ad Td in MP and got called by the SB and the BB. The flop came QQ4 with two diamonds, and the SB bet out for like half the pot. He was kind of short, so I pretty sure he had a pocket pair. I kind of doubted he would fold it to a shove, so I called. The turn was the 5d, and he bet out again. This time I moved all in, and he called with 55. In other words, the turn was the doom card that gave me the nut flush and him a boat. I wasn’t deep enough to get away from this, so I’m not beating myself up about it- it was just a bad spot.
I only had about 5K left at that point, and blinds were 150/300. A quiet player UTG+1 raised to 900, and I tilt-shoved with 88 UTG+2 into his AA. This isn’t awful, but honestly I think folding is better. There’s very little in this guy’s range that he’s raise-folding, and 88 is definitely behind his calling range.
It was a frustrating end to a frustrating series. Even though I’m down pretty substantially on the turnaments, the series was good for me just because it got me to put in some long sessions. Overall I’m up an appreciable amount on the last two weeks, and I feel really on top of my deep-stacked cash play. Thanks for following along!
Oh and congratulations to Shaundeeb, who won the $300 PLO rebuy. He’s one of few if any players to have won both a FTOPS and a WCOOP event. Way to go Shaun!