Monday, September 29, 2008

40 Days of Pain - Day 8

Well, my brain hasn't started leaking out of my ears yet. I'm 20% of the way there and so far I'm just a tad behind pace. I've made 39,400 points of progress in these past 8 days and while I still have a long way to go I like my chances of at least getting close to my goal of 195,000 points in 40 days.

I had kind of a wild ride over the weekend. On Saturday I found myself losing about $2,500 at one point before flipping it completely around and actually winning $2,000!

Then on Sunday I found myself stuck a little over $5,000 (flirting with my worst day ever), before managing to bring it all the way back to just over even for the day!

Part of that comeback was a good result in the $215 Sunday Million. We started with about 7,300 players and by the time we were down to 100 I'd run my starting stack of 10,000 chips all the way up to 1.4 million and was in the top 10. I caught a few breaks of course (most notably beating AQ with QJ in a big all in confrontation), but I won a ton of pots in this tournament with nothing.

The great thing about this tournament (and the WCOOP tournaments as well) is that it's a big deal for most of the people who are playing. If you run a $215 tournament at the same time on some other day with no satellites you'll get something like 300-400 players, maybe less. Those are the people who are $215 tournament players. Most of them have the bankroll to play tournaments of that size, feel comfortable with the stakes, and have worked their way up playing in smaller tournaments.

That means in the Sunday Million we have 7,000 players who don't really belong. When you get close to the money, these players lock up. If you have a solid chip stack (like I did in this tournament about that time) and the combination of balls and experience to pull it off, you can totally run them over. That's just what I did.

The tournament paid 1,080 places and between the time that player 1,300 went broke and we made the money I probably won 1/3 of the pots at my table and almost doubled my already strong stack without ever showing down a hand. Most of the time I just raised and everyone folded. Sometimes when someone would raise in front of me I'd put them all in before the flop. Other times I'd just call and then raise them on the flop. It's great fun to run over weak players like this!

Unfortunately I finally ran into some real hands, missed with a few of my hands when I was facing resistance and ended up finishing in 68th place. It paid $2,250 and I feel like I couldn't have done too much differently in the period where I went slowly down the tubes, but 9th was $10,000 and first was $184,000 so I did feel a little disappointed to miss out on the final table.

It's hard not playing multitables when that's what I want to do, but there's so gold in the pot at the end of the FPP rainbow that I have to just worry about points for a while. For now my plan is to play a few on Sundays and leave it at that.

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