Dead, dead, and dead again

The MATH was last night. To warm up and expecting to cover my entry price cheaply, I played one of the Tier One SnGs. As I've written many times before, these are usually pretty easy, especially the turbo ones, since 5 out of 18 get the top prize. Playing for 4th or 5th is a lot easier than playing for 1st.

I might just as well have flushed my entry fee. I didn't get a single decent starting hand the whole tournament. And every time I got something marginal -- good enough to come in first, but not really good enough to call a raise -- someone ahead of me would have raised it. I did make the final table (about as tough as breathing), but didn't last long after that.

Figuring the dearth of decent cards couldn't continue, I immediately signed up for another Tier One SnG. Well, I was wrong. The dearth of cards could continue. I did manage to catch one great hand when a very speculative play came through and I slow played it successfully. But I lost it all back to the same guy a while later when I flopped a baby flush and he had two big cards of the same suit. I obviously knew it was a possibility, but it was only a 2.5% chance of him having two cards of that suit. Mine were small enough it was a virtual lock that his would be higher, but, still, it's 2.5%.

So I bust out of the second SnG having backed into a couple decent hands, one of which didn't have a favorable outcome. No good starters in two tourneys.

Along comes the MATH. I figure all the bad cards should be out of my system by now and I should get some great starters. Yeah, right. The only premium starter I got all night, I raise, everybody folds. Perfect.

I still managed to hang in to very near the points bubble, but I was very close to the cutoff and would certainly have felt more comfortable if my stack was just a bit bigger. So when it folds to me in the SB and I'm holding TT -- the second best starting hand I've seen all night -- I make a normal raise, half hoping the BB folds, half hoping he doesn't. He doesn't. The flop seems unlikely to have helped. The BB has been making plays at pots all night, and has a huge stack, so I figure I'll make my stand here by trying to entice him to make a play and then pushing in the rest. I check, he makes a suspiciously small bet (at least in retrospect I think it was suspicious), I push all-in and he insta-calls. When his chips beat mine into the pot, which is very tough to do online, I knew I was in trouble. He turns over AA and I hit the rail.

I'm normally very stoic about these things. I try to pattern myself after guys like Paul Darden and John Juanda rather than Hellmuth or Matusow. I didn't throw a temper tantrum or anything, but I felt like I'd been kicked in the gut. Instant deep depression.

I tried to get outside myself and think about why this hit me so hard. It wasn't losing three tournaments in a row. I've had far worse losing streaks. It wasn't missing the points for the BBT. There are more opportunities to get the points I need to make the freeroll.

I think I finally came up with the answer. It dawned on me that a big part of why this hit me so hard was that I don't often get slow played so effectively. The slow play with the flush earlier in the evening was effective, but in that case I was clearly aware of the possibility and simply discounted it due to the long odds. That it turned out that way I can simply chalk up to bad luck. This one completely blind-sided me. And that doesn't happen very often. I'm thinking that's a good thing. I don't know, maybe I'm just desperately searching for a silver lining in this dark cloud.

Tonight I'm planning to take a shot at the 50-50 I've been hearing everybody talk about. Wednesday is the Mookie. Thursday is Riverchasers. For sure this time. I checked the schedule. Sunday is the final BBT event, Miami Don's Big Game. I already have my ticket and am anxiously awaiting my chance to kick some Big Game butt.