Sensei’s Poker Dojo

(Plus I won a nice pot with it!)

I probably should have posted about it a while ago, but whatever. I busted out of the main event during the first orbit of day 3. My QQ lost to AK all in preflop, which is pretty standard. The short version of my tournament report is that I played really fantastic poker, was the best player at my table at pretty much every table I was at over the course of the 3 days, had an above-average chipstack going into day 3 and was ready to build it up to a huge stack as we got into the money, but instead I lost a 55/45 and busted out entirely. It was the first time I was all in for my tournament life during the whole tournament, too. I may write up a more comprehensive report at some point, but I’m really not excited about it.

Sigh. Back to the grind.

Edit: But on the plus side, I had 2 home runs, 2 triples, and a single in 5 at bats today in our softball game. 3 or 4 runs, 5 or 6 RBIs. We won by an outrageous margin, like 40-8.  Booya.

Last Thursday during day 1A of the main event, I was moved to a new table about 6 hours in. The blinds had just been changed to 150/300/25, and my new opponents were, almost without exception, fantastically weak and predictable players. I began attacking the blinds with ruthless abandon, probably winning about 1/3 of the hands played. Rarely were the pots more than the blinds and antes. (sometimes with a bonus 500 chip from one of the blinds calling my raise and checkfolding the flop). However, my stack was gradually and consistently increasing.

Now the thing about live tournaments, especially those with inexperienced fields, is that collecting the antes always takes up a ton of time. Time that could better be spent by me stealing more of their blinds and antes.  So with the advantage of my convenient location to the dealer’s immediate left, I took it upon myself to collect the antes from the 2, 3, and 4 seats and drag them to the spot on the felt where the pot would end up before the dealer even finished shuffling. In doing so, I probably added several extra hands to the session. The dealers liked me a lot, too, since I was making their job easier. It was a win-win situation.