Reflections on The Blogger Tournament

Random Thoughts:

The guy with the avatar of James Traficante was an ASS. He says he was jerking us all around, but he kept it up for 2 straight hours. Yuck!

Play was very tight. I did not see any of the normal bluffing off of chips like I see in the Party Poker tournaments. Even in the early going it was predominantly fold, fold, fold, raise, fold, fold, fold win the blinds.

I busted out on the bubble in 19th out of 151. It was ridiculously tight on the bubble. 3 tables of nothing but folding. I don't know about the financial situation of the rest of the guys but folding my way to a $14 profit after 2 hours of work was not going to make me very happy. I was all in at least twice an orbit. Unfortunately, I got called a couple of times and lost the coin flips so I never got above the short stack mode.

I lost to slow played Aces twice including the hand that busted me out. I believe the blinds were 200-400 with $50 antes. I only had around 3000 left. Folded to the small blind who doubles the blind. I have A-7 offsuit in the big blind. Instead of raising him all in, I decide to call and then push if I hit the Ace or he checks to me. The flop came all cards under 10 and he checked so I pushed in. He calls in a flash and flips over his Aces. Oops.

Overall I got lucky a few times and unlucky a few times. The bad beat I remember was going all in with AQ offsuit and being called by player who had about 1/2 as many chips with AQ suited. Oh well, we'll split the blinds, that's OK. The flop comes single suited and it just happens to match my opponents' cards. AHHHHHH!

The funnest lucky beat was when Traficant, who was bullying the table verbally and with his chips for the first two hours, raised my big blind. It looked like his normal steal attempts, so I reraised him all in with Queen Jack. He had about twice as many chips as I did and he called, surprisingly. He turned over A-7 offsuit. I hit my Queen on the flop and he never found another Ace. Then he bitched and moaned about how bad a play I made raising all in with that crap. Some of the others came to my defense to remind him that he was stealing and that A-7 is not that great a hand either. I also had to trash talk and kept telling him not to fuck with my blind which he pretty much left alone the rest of the night.