A Good Night at the Tables

Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.

--Steven Wright

Well, nobody died, but I did have a pretty late night Friday night. I was playing in the PokerSourceOnline.com $5k freeroll on Absolute. The top 54 places paid, and there were 475 people registered when the tournament started. All I can say is I'm lucky to have survived the first hour, since I didn't see a playable hand the whole time. It was basically post blinds and fold for the first hour, and then for the next half hour after the first break.

I finally started to see a few good hands, and managed to work my chip stack up. I had about an average stack going into the second hour, and with blinds at 300/600, I found myself at an extremely tight table. This made it pretty easy to steal the blinds when I was on the button or one seat to the right of the button. All it took was a minimum raise when everyone folded around to me.

I did pretty well all through the second and third hour, keeping my stack at about average. Not too far into the third hour, I was in the money. The antes had kicked in sometime around the middle of the second hour, so I had to play a few more hands to pay the antes.

I had my sights set on position 36, which was the next step up in money, when the bad beat hit. The blinds were 500/1000, and I was on the button with KQ suited. Everyone folded around to me, and raised to 2000. The small blind folded, and the big blind went all-in. I had him covered by a couple of thousand, and he had been going all-in to steal anytime someone raised because he was short-stack at the table. I called. When the cards turned up, he had pocket 9's. The first card off on the flop was a King, and I was good to go. But when the river came up a 9, I was down to just over 2 times the big blind.

I never really got anything good to play after that, so I finished in 40th place, out of 475. Not bad, and I made $17.50 for my efforts. I figure that works out to $5/hour, since I played for about 3.5 hours. I was out of the game at 1am, and was really ready for bed. I was getting pretty tired, and I think it was about to start affecting my decision making.

All told, I'm happy with my performance, because I had every chance to bust out during the first hour and a half. I had plenty of bad aces and mediocre kings that many folks would have played, but I had the discipline to lay them down. I didn't chase any long-shot draws, and didn't siphon off my chips to the competition. So I feel like I scored a victory just by surviving as long as I did.

Of course, that $1250 first place payment would have been nice. Maybe later this month. PokerSourceOnline is having another $5k freeroll on Party. I guess I'll give it another shot. It doesn't cost anything but time, and since I'm going to play for free anyway, I guess I should at least play in a game that may pay.