Missed it by THAT much

I was really hoping to pick up in the Riverchasers last night the points I needed to make the BBT top 50. Alas, such was not to be the case.

I had a fairly early score when a SB special came through for me. Three limpers ahead, I completed with 94s. Yeah, it's a crap hand, but they were SOOTED! Seriously, I was getting 9:1 on my money. I'll call with any two getting those kinds of odds. The flop was 794. I was able to ride it to a pretty nice 1350 pot.

This gave me enough chips that I probably could have folded my way into the points. In retrospect, I should have clicked the "sit out" button just like I was thinking of doing. But, no, I couldn't do anything smart like that.

I pretty much moved sideways for quite a while and was maybe half a dozen eliminations from the points. Then I get QQ. I do a standard 3BB raise. TheWhisper78, who has been abusing the table with his big stack for quite some time, pushes all-in. There's 450 in the pot and he makes it 4655 to go. Slight overbet. I figure this is nothing but a steal so I make the call. I'm right as he shows KTs. I'm 2:1 to take this down, double up, and be in a good position to make the money, not just the points. Of course, the flop comes KK9 and I go home before the first break.

Anxious for more punishment, I jumped right into the $26k. I was doing so-so when I made the mistake of running a perfectly good bluff against what I can only assume was a calling station. Admittedly, I had nothing but a big card, but this fool calls my all-in for all but the last 500 of his chips with nothing but second pair and a mediocre kicker. He could have walked away with a few lumps, but still in decent shape. Instead he decides to risk most of his stack on second pair. While the board could have been better for my bluff, there's no way he could have reasonably figured me for bluffing here. There were far too many perfectly reasonable hands that had him in a world of hurt. I should have recognized from all his min-bets that he was the kind of player who wasn't smart enough to lay down a hand like that.

Still feeling the need for pain, I decided to jump into another Tier One ticket tourney. I tried something different this time. It's the first I've noticed the heads-up tournaments FT has. Four players, heads-up, winner take all. I won my first table. The second table we went back and forth for a while. I thought I was going to cash in when I caught pocket 9's and turned the set, but I slow played too long. I made my move on the river. Sadly, the river brought the third spade and the other guy had two little ones in his hand.

I need to re-learn the lesson of not being in too much of a hurry when heads-up. It was kind of fun, though, so I think I'll give it another shot. I used to be pretty good short-handed and heads up, but playing all these blogger tournaments and Tier One ticket things I find I'm not spending as much time in normal short-handed situations. The heads-up ticket tournament is cheap and looks like it might be a good way to keep in practice.

The final BBT event is Miami Don's Big Game on Sunday at 9:30 EDT. While I don't look forward to playing two big tournaments at once, I'm definitely hoping I'll still be playing the $500k when the Big Game starts.