A horrendous but profitable Sunday

I haven’t posted in the blog for a while. First, I’ve been sick. Second, I haven’t played a lot of poker. I almost didn’t play yesterday as I wasn’t feeling great, but decided to do so anyhow for better or worst.

I was sitted at Raymer’s table in the PS Million $500 tourney. One interesting hand early in the tourney. Raymer raises early, a middle player calls and I am next to act with KK. I am thinking about what to raise, if I should, how much to raise, and then boom – I folded my hand because of a timeout. I am so used to PS kicking in the timer that I forgot it doesn’t do that before the flop unless you have money invested in the pot. Ouch – not a good start.

I then made a boneheaded play in the UB $200 event and decided this wasn’t going to be my day. I decided to cut my losses and I unregistered all of the events I had planned to play and would just enjoy the night with my family until I doubled up in the $50 buyin tourney. It was approaching 6:00 and it looked like I would be in the $50 for a while so I went ahead and registered for the 750K at FTP. I got knocked out of the $50 and the PS tourney and was left with just the FTP.

With about 100 players left until the money, the most boneheaded thing happened at my table. One of the short stacks typed in PLAY SLOW. A conversation started up and 8 of the 10 players at the table allowed their time to tick down to the very last second on EVERY hand. It was torture. I normally don’t tell players how to play but I told everyone they were just doing themselves more harm than good. Fortunately, I did manage to increase my stack by 20% or so, but probably not nearly as much as I would have if my table had played like normal. They were all amatuers, but they did all cash – woohoo for them! The tourney paid about 660 players and all of them were knocked out except for 2 with 200 players remaining. It was absolute torture playing at that table. First place pays $160K and they were trying to win $250. Even after the bubble burst, one of the players played slow until he was knocked out with about 150 players remaining.

I basically played terrible in all 4 of my tourneys, but once we got close to the bubble I did kick in and start to concentrate. I consistently kept my stack at about half the average all the way from 600 players down to about 70 when I finally got knocked out. It was pretty boring poker though. My stack wasn’t large enough to reraise with folding equity and I didn’t have enough to make a normal raise before the flop without being pot-committed, so it was all-in every time I played a hand.

The good news is that I did end up posting a profit for the day even though I felt like I was completely off my game.

Congrats to Tall Paul from the ITH forums for finishing in the top 60 in the Sunday Millions and Pearljammer who finished 20th in the FTP 750K.