Another Win in Pendleton

Once again I had a successful trip to Pendleton. As always, there were a lot of very nice people there and many that I already knew from the Seattle area or from other tournaments. I played in 4 tournaments, one each day from thursday to sunday. I already documented, I took 6th place on thursday and followed that with non-cashes in the two biggest tournaments there on friday and saturday. However, I won the sunday tournament with about 250 entrants, which was good for about 13k. I really played well in this tournament by building chips early, then doubling up to become one of the chip leaders in the middle of the tournament. I then slowly increased my chip stack by picking up some blinds and winning some small pots. I was probably second or third in chips entering the final table. This final table was a bit tougher than the one on thursday with two very good players and a few decent players mixed with 3 weak players who were short stacked and out very quickly. A little later I lost about half of my chips when I got a guy all in before the flop with KK vs his 44. A 4 came on the river to cripple me, but I battled back by winning some blinds. A little later I had a scare when I raised with QQ and a very good player moved all in from the big blind. I had been raising his blind a ton, so I knew he would do this at some point assuming I had a weak hand and would fold. I quickly called and he was bluffing with K7. However the flop came K87, so I needed one of the two remaining queens to stay alive in the tournament (I had 10% chance to win at this point after having about 70% before this horrible flop). A queen came on the turn to came on the turn and a 7 came on the river giving me a higher full house. He had about 10 fans there and they went crazy when the 7 came because they thought that his full house was the winner. It was kind of funny, especially when I was looking down at the chip lead having just crippled the best opponent at the table.

At this point there were 5 of us remaining and the question was posed about making a deal and splitting up the remaining prize money. All of the other players were interested in a deal, but I shut it down before negotiations began knowing that I had the best chance a this point, and I was very confident that I had control of the table. 5th place then got knocked out before I knocked out the 4th and 3rd place finishers. Now I was heads-up with one of the weaker players (yet very erratic, which made him tough to play against during the final table. He was the type of guy that I had a tough time figuring out what he's doing because he doesn't even know what he's doing). I had 330K in chips and he had 130K in chips entering heads up play which lasted 4 hands until I won the $13,000 for first place.