Some decent tournament success.

Since Friday I have played about 10 low buy in tournaments and cashed or placed in 8 of them. I’m having a pretty good run.

It started Friday night was I decided to play another one of the $1 NLHE tourneys on Stars. I doubled up a couple of times early and got to be sitting pretty good. I started playing a $3 NLHE tourney about an hour after I started the $1 and played them simultaneously. There were 997 entries in the $1 and 1457 entries in the $3. After about 3 or 4 hours of play I got crippled in both of them with my AQ. I wound up placing 20^th out of 997 in the $1 and 100^th out of 1457 in the $3. I’ll have to admit that I was tilted pretty bad after getting sucked out on in the $1 with my AQ and I should have focused a lot more on the $3 tourney instead of letting another AQ get shell shocked. 1^st place in the $3 paid $1K so that would have been a VERY nice pay day.

On to Saturday. I went over to a friends house that morning and played a game of HORSE for micro limits $.10/.50 spread. I have never played Razz or Stud8 before so this was a fun learning experience. I didn’t fair to bad by breaking even for the 4 hour session.

Sunday I decided to play some more low buy-ins on stars. I played a couple of the $1 + .20 5 table SnG’s and took some beats early to get put out. I wound up besting 44 other players in the 3^rd one to take it down. I then played a $5 + .50 one table NLHE tourney and took down 2^nd. 

Later that night I decided to use my free roll into step one on party. So we get underway and right off the bat I can tell it’s going to be a good one. I’ve noticed lately that most of the step tournaments have kind of tightened up and it’s been a challenge to coast into the retry level. This one on the other hand has had two all ins in the first level. Yum yum. The player to my direct left has started playing almost every hand and raising on the flop. Can you say TRAP!! I started trying to play some good drawing hands and waiting until I hit a flop pretty good. I finally did just that and wound up doubling up through him. We then got down to 6 players and then there was a 3 way all in. One of the all ins had total crap like a 5,2 or something and win they hit two pair on the turn and river and took down the $2500 pot they stated that they just wanted to take 6^th and get the $4. I then proceeded to provoke the same player into calling my all in when I had an AK and I knocked them out, putting me in great shape to take it down. I then did just that and won my entry into step 2.

I played the 2^nd step right after that and did fairly well but went out in 3^rd placed. Oh well, I had a great time in the tournaments this weekend and fared pretty well. I did have a hand in the $1 5 table on stars that will stick with me for a long time to come.  I was in the big blind with  a 42o and got to see the flop un-raised with 3 others. The flop came out 5,4,2 giving me two pair. The sb checked I bet the min $75 everyone called. I was thinking at the time, I should be worried about someone holding an A,3 for the straight, then another 4 peeled off on the turn. Giving me the boat. SB checks, another check, and I once again bet the min $75. Call, button raises to $150, sb re-raises to $250, I re-raise to $500. Fold all-in, raise-all-in, and I call. The small did indeed have the straight but didn’t bet when that was the nuts, and I wound up taking down a very large pot. That was probably the pot that won it for me.