♠ Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Two (basically)
A quick note as I wait for Everquest II to install and patch.
I went up to Little River in Manistee yesterday (Tuesday) partially for their tournament, but more for the post-tournament cash games. I finished the day $18 to the good, which counts as a positive result as much as a day $18 to the bad counts as a negative result, and my "streak" had several of those results.
I've only participated in that tournament one other time, some months ago, perhaps even before I was officially a pro. (I could look in my old posts here, but that would take effort.) My opinion at the time was that the blinds escalated too quickly, and stack sizes were too small relative to the stakes, to make the tournament anything beyond a glorified crapshoot. After yesterday's tournament, I still feel that way, even though I think that the way my game has changed in the last couple of months increased my chances of moneying such an event.
In the first hour of the tournament, when the blinds were (relative to stack sizes) about where they should be for the middle of a tournament, I either hit with my big aces or got the other guy to lay down his cards if I didn't hit, and built my stack up from T$300 to about T$900 at the first break. It helped that we had a new player on my right, who knew the game but whose style was only appropriate to a home game. He blew off two rebuys that he, well, shouldn't have, and fortunately I caught much of it.
But even with the T$1000 add-on after the break, my stack wasn't in great shape for the T$50/T$100 and T$100/T$200 rounds, and neither was anyone else's, and so it was a crapshoot. I got overcommitted with an AQ♥ that missed and basically busted out of the tournament, although the second break hit right after that hand and I had then a single black chip. I did triple it up, but still didn't have enough to pay the big blind, and so before it came I threw my T$300 in with 89o, missed, and then waited for the cash games to start.
The cash game was interesting only in that the players seemed all to be of roughly equal skill. Nobody made out as a huge winner, but a couple of people dumped a lot of money. Since none of the players won big, I have to assume that those donators were basically paying our rake for us.
Still, I cashed out $58 in profit from the ring game, seven bets, which made up for the $40 I spent in the tournament, so that with gas included I ended up with basically a break-even day. Ahh well, can't win them all.
