I done OK

This evening was my second try to win a seat in Sunday's final of the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker. I made it. I can even tell you the secret of how to do well in one of these things: (1) Get dealt a lot of pocket pairs and have them turn into sets with an absurdly high frequency, and (2) don't donk off the chips you win from (1) by making big bluffs. Allow me to illustrate.

This is hand #19 of the tournament:





Next up is hand #27:




My opponent here did not approve of my play of this hand, as demonstrated by the ensuing chat:

Dealer: CrazyEights8 finished the tournament in 493rd place
CrazyEights8 [observer]: i love stupid
CrazyEights8 [observer]: nice call kid
CrazyEights8 [observer]: gla
Dealer: Game #22983654348: CUdeP wins pot (150)
Dealer: Limits going up: blinds 20/40
CrazyEights8 [observer]: twice u over played a hand with a flush ont he board
Dealer: Game #22983671731: michal48 wins pot (300)
Rakewell1: and both times it was unlikely my opponent had the flush
CrazyEights8 [observer]: i love stupid
Rakewell1: but don't let that cloud your judgment of me
CrazyEights8 [observer]: stupid has its rewards
TNSpaceman: for god's sake, would you just leave the rail? it's a frickin freeroll.

Interesting he says that I was stupid, when I was actually ahead at every point throughout the hand. He apparently thinks that if there are three of a suit on the board and you don't have the flush, you must assume that your opponent does. I do not share the view that one should make that assumption. Oh well.

Shamus at that point reminded me to quick take a snapshot of the tourney lobby because I was in the top 10:



I must always document these moments, because they don't last long!

For hand #74, I should perhaps add a third piece of advice on advancing in tournaments: Get aces when somebody else has queens. Yes, that is excellent advice indeed. The hand just plays itself.




I got moved to a new table at this point, but continued my brilliant strategy of being dealt pocket pairs and turning them into sets (or full houses) on hand #114 (there was a long spell there for the intervening 39 hands):




For the next part of our lesson, we move on to hand #125, in which I illustrate the perfect way NOT to bluff. Of course, I was fully aware that it was boneheaded and doomed to failure, but I did it purely for pedagogical purposes, so that I could show my faithful readers what not to do. (I should be selling Isuzus.)



That major blunder really set me back, and I had to switch strategies, looking for spots to steal the blinds and put in all-in reraises when I thought somebody else was stealing. That kept me afloat for a long time.

Of course, it goes without saying that one cannot succeed in a tournament without occasionally playing the mighty deuce-four, as I show in hand #162:



I think I had some sort of tell there, and everybody knew I held the 2-4 and they were smart enough not to want to tangle with it.

I started to get back into contention with hand #180, in which I reverted to the pre-planned strategy of catching pocket pairs and turning them into sets and full houses:




At this point I was still below average in chips, but felt like taking a chance. My opponent in hand #190 was very tight, and his min-raise from under the gun just screamed aces or kings. I decided to take a gamble and see if I could outflop aces. Because his cards were virtually face up with his move, I thought I could either stack him or get away with minimal loss. The plan succeeded perfectly:





That win finally put me back above the average chip stack, and in reasonably safe position to earn a seat, with only 22 eliminations yet to go. As you can see, even with a modestly above-average stack I was in 23rd place at that point, meaning that the distribution of stacks was skewed heavily toward the top end, and there were plenty of short stacks teetering on the brink.




So I hunkered down and played conservatively. I reverted back to the core strategy of flopping sets, as shown in hand #222:



That propelled me back into the top 10 for the first time since the aces vs. queens hand, so I quickly captured the ephemeral evidence:



Tenth place, with only four eliminations left to go for a seat. Yes, this pairs/sets approach is clearly working well. So I waited just 12 hands before doing it again, in hand #234:




After establishing such a reputation (I showed that set of queens), naturally I needed to capitalize on it, so tried a little steal in hand #239:




Somewhere in here, after a few smallish pots, I climbed as high as 6th place (though I had the wrong name highlighted in the screen shot):



My last hand of the tournament was #255. The opponent here had been playing balls-to-the-wall, raising light and frequently, so I thought he was a good target for a check-raise, even holding nothing, when the flop looked like it probably would have missed him completely:



I really wish I had folded to his all-in. It was a big blunder. I still had enough chips to fight back in another spot. In fact, had I survived one more place, I would have moved up from winning a Step 2 ticket to a Step 3 ticket. But oddly, that's actually the fact that pushed me to call--I knew he knew that I knew we were on another bubble, which meant that as the bigger stack he might easily think I'd fold rather than risk elimination, and therefore push light. But I made a snap decision that was, I think, objectively wrong (and I'd say the same even if I had sucked out a win there). What can I say? I went crazy! I plead temporary insanity and throw myself on the mercy of the court.

Anyway, I finished in 28th place out of 559 entrants, which isn't terrible. It was strange to make only two big bluffs in the entire tournament, and get called on both of them. That's not the way it's supposed to work! I forgot Phil Gordon's maxim: Don't bluff if they're gonna call. But I accomplished my primary purpose of gaining entry to the final event, which means that I can play the rest of the qualifying tourneys to win rather than to "cash," or even skip them altogether if the timing doesn't work right on any particular day (though it's not like I really have a whole lot of competing things to be doing). I was also pleased that I never got the big money in as an underdog, except in the two places where I was doing so deliberately.

I see that Shamus has already beaten me to a write-up of the event, so check his perspective here.