Never give in. Never give in.

It's pretty cheeky and melodramatic of me to coopt Winston Churchill's famous address to his childhood school. After all, he was talking about Hitler attacking Great Britain, and I'm talking about a $15 online poker tournament. But I'm going to do it anyway:

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great
or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honor and good
sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of
the enemy.

I was reminded of that speech because I just won the HORSE tournament that the last couple of posts were about--and I did it after being severely short-stacked for a very long time. I think this marks the best tournament comeback I've ever made, from nearly being out on the final table bubble (9 left) with only one big bet left in my stack, to taking first place of $435.

When we were first into the money, I was cruising high, one of the chip leaders. Then I got this devastating hand:





(PokerStars does not scramble stud hands, so the order that you see is how they came.)

That was almost the end of me. But just a couple of hands later I won this squeaker:




That put me back into play, at least marginally. But then I got hosed again:



Yes, I bet it hard all the way. The guy who won that hand was an absolute maniac. Actually, that proved to be my salvation, after this. He was very, very, very slow to catch on to the fact that I was only putting my last chips in with strong hands. When I had just one or two bets, he'd call and I'd win. When I had a bit more, he'd try to push me off of hands when I had a third or more of my stack in. As the doctor says at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai (which I just watched again last week--one of the greatest movies of all time), "Madness!"

We were, at this point, on the final table bubble, with a pay jump of an extra $20, so I made myself an expert at folding. Once at the final table, three others went out lickety split before I had a chance to make a move. Here's the thing that is for me unprecedented: I remained the short stack for almost the entire time from the nine-handed final-table bubble until well into three-handed play. (Had to say "almost" because I did have one brief jaunt up to 4th/8, but then promptly got swatted down again.) At that point the maniac finally spewed off so many chips that I caught up to him and got into second chip position.

I was picking up a pot here and there when I had something good, but mostly biding my time to let the others knock each other out. What's surprising is that it actually worked! I was like the "little rat" that Daniel Negreanu condemns for playing timidly, sneaking up the money ladder. But when the big stacks are throwing huge raises at each other in every pot with marginal hands (which they were), it made perfect sense to me to sit back and watch the fur fly. I was really quite surprised to see myself surviving one elimination after another, when they didn't have the sense to wait for me to get blinded off. One guy was sitting out for the last hour or so, and coasted into 5th. It was only after he was gone that I really started playing again.

Anyway, after we had played three-handed for a long time, the other guy finally knocked out the maniac, and started heads-up play with a 2:1 chip lead. I did not think that I was likely to win. My opponent had been aggressive, but not insanely so. He was not going to be a pushover, that was for sure.

But I got lucky in a couple of key spots, with the big turning point being a hand in which I caught quad queens (hand #23). Forty hands after we had started heads-up play, I had him. Here's the whole gruesome battle, if you want to watch. He seriously turned on the afterburners on his level of aggression, as you'll see if you watch this playback. My best strategy appeared to be to lie in wait with better hands and let him hang himself. It worked well enough, I guess. I can show you the whole thing because it coincidentally all transpired during a hold'em round.



My opponent had been not only a decent player but a decent sportsman all the way through. He didn't complain about bad beats, didn't boast when winning a hand, didn't engage in trash talk, even gave out a few "nh" messages. But I lost all respect for him when, after the final hand, in which my K-K held up against his A-2, he signed off with this farewell:

ImLoveInErja said, "gg nigg3r"

Yeah, I think I'll forward that one to PokerStars. Jerk.


Just playing this tournament was weird in the first place, because it started at 6:45. I'm almost never up then. I was today only because I had been lying in bed for the previous couple of hours unable to get back to sleep. This may be the first time in my life that I'm glad I had a bout of insomnia.