Small cash

Just got home from Caesars Palace, where I made a tiny bit of money in a tournament.

Hey, you're thinking--wasn't Caesars the place that you crucified just a few days ago for giving out bogus tournament information, with the implied threat that you wouldn't darken their door again? Um, well, yeah. But I forgive so easily!

Actually, it was mostly unintentional. That is, I didn't really set out with the intention of playing a tournament today, and I had no thought of taking Caesars of my list of cash-game venues. Several mostly arbitrary factors had made me settle on Caesars for my cash game today. As it got close to 10 p.m., I was waning, but didn't really feel like quitting playing for the day. On the other hand, I didn't want several hundred dollars at risk without being fully sharp. So it dawned on me that a tournament might be the thing to do. And, by happy coincidence, Caesars has a nightly 10:00 p.m. tournament for $70. The structure isn't great (3000 chips, first blinds 25/50, so start wth 60 BB; 20 minute levels), but it's something.

There were 65 people in it. I played about as well as I expect of myself. I wasn't trying to be ultra-aggressive and build a huge stack--just steal here and there, be willing to get it all in with a much lower threshold than I would for a cash game, etc. It worked well enough, I suppose.

I ended up in 8th place, with 9 paying. The payout structure needs serious work, though. I collected only $130, not even double my buy-in, and the 9th-place finisher got only $95 or so. That's just wrong.

I was all-in with the worst of it only once. When we were near the bubble, I had one of the larger stacks and pushed from the cutoff with Q-10. Woman in the big blind called with Q-J. I bounced her out when a 10 came on the turn. In return, at the final table, after we had lost the 9th-place guy, I called a shove from a smaller stack with suited A-5 to his K-J and lost half my stack when a jack hit the turn.

That reduced me to about 10 big blinds, so I became a fairly frequent pusher, to keep myself afloat while I still had some fold equity. Finally I did it from the button with 7-7 after it had been folded around to me, and the small blind called with A-Q. Ace on the flop, and I was out.

It took 3 3/4 hours to get that far, and probably less than another hour for them to play it out, because it was already shove-or-fold for several of the remaining players. The average stack was only about 20 BB when I left, so not a lot of room for play.

It was modestly fun. And it broke an ugly trend: I have not cashed in a live tournament since October, 2007. To be fair, this is only the 11th one that I've played in that time, and going ten tournaments without a cash is hardly alarming, when only 9-10% get paid every time. Actually, that's one of the main reasons I do so few tournaments--I just intensely dislike the fact that you will be walking away with nothing most of the time.

It was nice to chalk up a tournament W for the books, even an itty bitty one. Maybe, just maybe, I'll start doing a few more of them.