Good Week

As I mentioned in my last post, I would be attending another LA Poker Classic (LAPC) event on Thursday. This was a $1500 buy-in no limit hold em. I ended up playing for 12 hours on Thursday until 13 of us were left. We then broke for the night and play resumed on Friday at 7 pm. I went into Day 2 3rd in chips behind David "Dragon" Pham and someone else. Pham was named the 2007 player of the year for the second time is his career, so he was obviously a good player. Also remaining was Men Nguyen who has been the player of the year 3 times in the past 10 years as well as some other good players.
After we got to the final table of 10 players I doubled up the short stack of the tournament when my 66 fell to his 1010. then after going through the blinds a few times and the one blind level jump, I found myself short stacked. I moved all in with 3 players left to act with A8. Pham had 99 in the big blind, and I was eliminated in 9th place. I was pretty disappointed for a while with this result because I questioned how I played the 66 hand and because I had my eye on the $71,000 first prize, or even the 40-some for second or 30-some for third. I ended up winning 5400 for ninth, which was still good.
I also played cash games for like 2 hours on Thursday before the tourney and made like $2500.

Yesterday (Sunday) I decided to play in the $330 with unlimited re-buys LAPC event. For the first two hours, players were allowed to re-buy at any point that they were under 1000 in chips, or double re-buy if they had 0 chips. So I double rebought to start the tourney, then busted and double rebought 3 times in the first two hours. One time I lost a coin-flip (AK vs. QQ), another time I got a guy all in on the flop with 44 when I had JJ, and he made a flush, and last I gambled with J8 suited all-in preflop against two other players. At the first break they also give you the option to add-on or double add-on. I of course chose to add-on twice which is pretty much a must in these tourneys. After all was said and done, this 330 tourney was actually a $3030 for me. I knew that 1230 was the bare minimum that I would use, and 3030 was the top end of what I felt I should be using on this tournament. Anyways, it worked out because I made it through Day 1 again and into day 2 where 18 players remained out of the almost 800 that entered. This time I was 14th in chips and quite short stacked to start day two. There were many interesting hands along the way, but in the interest of keeping this post a reasonable length I made it to the top 4, where we decided to chop the prize money. I was 3rd in chips at the time and I ended up getting $87,660. This was close to second place money with was fine because the blinds had gotten very high, and soon we would all be forced to gamble a lot. I generally don't like to chop, but 4th place was 42000 and 3rd was 64000 while 2nd was 99000 and 1st was 167000. I felt that I was better than my opponents, but they were all willing to gamble, which was not good because I would have to be attempting to steal blinds very frequently. Since they were all that type of player, I didn't see an easy was to accumulate chips at this stage, so I felt that a chop was a good choice. Also, $87,660 is more than double and other single day win in my life.
All in all, it was a great day and week, but my brain is complete mush right now, as I just got back about an hour ago, and I am falling asleep. I may or may not post more about this win, but if you'd like me to post some interesting hands or anything else, just leave a comment on here, or contact me however you'd like.