Stars & PayPal payments sent last night. I"ll do the bank transfers when I get a chance, but you"ll have to pm your details to me if I haven"t had them previously. If you paid by transfer and are happy to get it back by Stars, let me know. Sorry it isn"t more.
I have to say we were unlucky. The four hands I detailed on here were my four key hands in the tournament, not just bad beat stories. I was miles ahead in all four, but was outdrawn in three of them. On average, I should probably win three of those hands, which would have meant a pretty big stack. You need to have enough chips to absorb an outdraw in a deep-stacked tournament, but three of them is pushing it.
I"m surprised that I wasn"t at all unhappy last night or today regarding what might have been. There was an opportunity, but it didn"t work out. I was happy because I actually felt I had played well. Sometimes I know that I haven"t played well and I don"t mind saying when I think that, but yesterday I was pleased with my game. None of my opponents put me on anything like the hand I had in the four key pots and put loads of chips in when they were far behind. I didn"t put them on anything like they actually had either in a couple, but that was because their hands were so random that, when they hit, I couldn"t see it and thought I was still winning.
I don"t mind the guy who semi-bluffed with 45 on the Turn. I wanted him to think I had a pair less than A or non-A high cards and could fold to a bet, which he told me was exactly what he had thought. "If I thought you had an A I"d have bet more on the River". The River was just one of those things. I can"t complain about the guy with TT at the end either. The one with KQ, on the other hand, put almost half his chips in on a 7-card draw (two of which would make a flush that he didn"t have) with one card to come. He would have gone from a comfortable 27k to a less-than-comfortable 16k if he missed. My mistake was to assume he could only win with a full house. I suppose my other mistake was to assume he was a better player than he was. He had traveled from London and bought into the game, so I assumed he knew what he was doing. KQ! I feel I would still call his shove again now, cos I can"t see how anyone can have any straight draw in that hand. That really was the hand that made the difference. Dropping from a well-placed 39k down to 12k (when I should have increased), really knocked my tournament sideways. Although I eventually got back to 40k, that was still below average at that stage and, in the meantime, I had missed all the opportunities that a leading stack would have given me to build further.
So, things could have been different. A couple of those hands could have accelerated me to a big prize but I might have lost in some other way instead. The way I think about poker tournaments is that it is all about getting yourself into the situation where you have the opportunities. Sometimes they will then go your way and sometimes they will go against you, but manoeuvring yourself into that spot enough times is the key. In this tournament, I had the opportunities, which could have led to a good result, but they didn"t fall my way. On to the next one.
