Business, Pleasure and Loathing in Atlantic City

[SpaceLord]

So, since late Sunday, I have been in Philadelphia on business. Last night I attended the midnight 65$ NLHE tournament at the Trump Taj Mahal, of course, the same poker room as in Rounders.

All 117 of us started out with 15000 chips, blinds went up every 15 minutes. I normally play in Colorado, but it seems that the quality of players in AC was really bad.

Example:

With around 16BBs, I raise to 4BBs from the CutOff with 1010. A calling station calls from the blind. The flop comes J75. I shove, and he calls with A-5 offsuit. What did he expect me to have?

My only really bad move of the night, in my opinion, was against a guy with a slightly smaller stack. He shoves from early position, and I have AJs. I call, he shows AKx, and I make the flush on the turn.

At one point, with 28 or so players left, I calculate I have 21% of all the chips. Some really bad calls by my opponents left me with a mountain of chips.

At the final table, I begin as the chip leader. Even with that pile of chips, when we sat down, I only had 34ish BBs. I kinda stayed out of the fray at first, until a medium stack goes all in from early position, and I peek at my hole cards to see...KK. Awesome. I go all-in, to discourage the blinds. He shows K-Q, and angrily gets up to leave, when a A and 10 flop, and the turn is a....J. I go from chip leader to shortish stack.

I double up one more time, when my A-6 caught a 6 on the flop versus A-J. On the final hand, my A-10s failed to improve versus 7-7, and I win 1450 dollars.

Good times!

[nsidestrate]

At the last ITH convention, a number of us played in that tourney. The first one we played, Matthew and I both cashed. The second one, I think Ammbo and Osmosis made the final table. IIRC, Ammon made a deal when they were down to 5 or so.