Interesting Day

I don't know what to do: laugh, cry, be happy or upset. The good news, not only did I not bubble today's FTOPS tournaments, but I cashed in both with a final table. I final tabled the PL Holdem event and finished 7th out of 1076 entrants. It had to be one of the weirdest/hardest final tables I may ever have. First of all, I had very poor cards virtually the whole tourney, and the few good hands I got faired average at best or got no action. I had approximately 500 hands during the tourney. I had AA once and got a walk. I got KK four times (which is almost double expected), but I bought the blinds once, doubled up through AJ once, and lost the other two including my KO hand. I only had AK twice, but tripled up at the final table with it once vs AQ and 55. However, everytime I got allin I would win. I doubled or tripled up probably at least 6 times maybe more. From about 25 left until my elimination I was usually in the bottom 5 and often the bottom 3, but one thing you can do is be patient in PL. My VPIP was 12% for the entire tourney.

At the final table I finally started to get cards, but this was more of a curse than a blessing. One of the first hands a guy with 3 BBs shoved in 2nd position. I isolated him with JJ, and he woke up with AA. His range here has to be huge. While he was the short stack, I was short too. It took about 25% of my stack and left me with 150k. I was blinded down to just over 100k when my triple up occurred with the previously mentioned AK. On the KO hand, the UTG potted it, and it folded around to the SB (who was easily the tightest guy left). He repotted it. Now i had KK and can't possibly fold, but I wrote on AIM to my brother I was actually very worried he had AA. Of course he did and I was gone. That guy ended up winning it as he got smacked by the deck from that point on.

The Stud 8 was far less interesting. I placed 78th (just inside the money) out of 645 players. I basically folded for the first hour and a half. At one point, I had only seen 4th street four times in the first 65 hands. I hit one decent rush to get to 24K when the avg was 11k, but then went ice cold again. I still think Stud 8 may be the juiciest EV for a good all around poker player. The vast majority of guys are literally clueless. I've only played five of these where the structure was decent. I've cashed in three. I know this is a small sample size, but man the mistakes I see are unreal.

Anyway, maybe things are finally turning a corner. In 5 FTOPS events I now have 3 bubbles and 2 cashes. I'm not up much money on them for as well as I feel I've played (which can be annoying), but my game seems to be very strong heading into the WSOP. Hopefully now, I can just get something big going to give me the money I'd like to have for it.