I wish I had an exciting story to tell from my first live tournamnet but it was pretty much a pre-break bust. I played in the Bicycle $20 +$5 NL Hold ‘Em tournament last night and busted out early. I went over four complete orbits before getting a playable hand. Ok, I’ll admit I was playing very tight and tossing KJo to a raise and re-raise but I saw mostly Q3, 92, K4, etc. for four orbits. Heck, I would have taken a JTs UTG if I could have gotten it. :-) Finally, I get pocket aces. Big blind is $25 and I raise it up to $100 thinking that I don’t want to scare everybody out (just stealing the blinds would have been a waste at $25/$15). I get one caller. Flop comes mostly junk with a 10 high. I push all in and get called. I flip over AA and he flips up ATo. Anybody want to take a guess what came up on the turn? You guessed it, a 10! No ace on the river and I have to rebuy.
I guess I should feel somewhat complimented because two people who folded pre-flop to my $100 raise said that they would have played for $100 but that they knew I hadn’t played a hand all night and that if I was coming in it was with some solid cards.
So with my nice new stack of re-buy chips, I go another several orbits before getting 79s on the big blind. Flop comes 68T. A freakin’ straight on the flop. All In!!! I get one caller. He flips up JQ and he hits a 9 on the river.
Some things to point out: First, I’m not much of a NL player. I’m trying to learn the ins and outs playing $5 NL SnG games online. I can maybe see the first call with AT but the inside straight draw call just seems insane. Anybody have some advice on how they would have played these differently?
So I had an option to re-buy and the first break was coming up in about 5 minutes where I could have done an add-on and been back in ok position. I figured if I can’t win with pocket aces against AT or with a flopped straight, maybe it isn’t my night and I opted out and tried to find a good limit game.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
You played em perfect. As TJ says, all you can do is get your money in when you’re the favorite. I would have rebought here though, because obviously it’s easy to double up and you’re probably one of the better players at that table.
Remember that people play much looser in the rebuy period, and will often play any two face preflop. Sounds like you played perfect though.
Thanks for the feedback. I feel a little better :-) I probably should have rebought. I was just so funked out on those two beats. I ended up finding a nice $2/$4 cash game to entertain me and I’ll be back there very soon to give it another shot.
Welcome to the wonderful world of tournaments!
Don’t let the variance kill you :)
Thanks Felicia. I always look forward to your tourney reports. Lots of valuable gems I’ve picked out of your postings.