Almost Summer Camp!

Obviously I am referring to the WSOP...I leave next Friday, June 7 for a bit over a week and then return the end of June for 8-10 days.  So a total of 15-20 days in the lovely Rio.

As I had not been playing many (any really) tournaments I decided to play a bunch of tournaments at DE Park and Parx to get back in the MTT mode.  Tournaments are, of course, massively different animals than the cash games I normally play.  Generally the play is worse early, the stacks get shorter midway through the end and the variance is absurdly high.  Getting back in the groove of playing tournaments seemed to make sense as I could play these low buy in events and focus before some of the mid buy in events I'll be playing in Vegas.

The first few events I bricked off at DE Park including Event 1 ($560 NLHE), a bounty NLHE and a HORSE event where I got to about 15th while 9 paid.  Parx was a debacle as I bricked their deep stack $560 twice and lost a $3k PLO pot AAJ9ds to the old KK22.




Finally, I went back up last Wednesday to play their $200 6 max and possibly the afternoon PLO.  Well on my second buy-in of the 6-max I was cruising along playing hyper aggro: 3 betting a ton, a couple of cold 4 bets, floating and stealing, squeezing, etc.  I grinded myself up to one of the bigger stacks in the event when I made a call that I am not sure about.  There are 15 left and 13 cash.  Blinds 2-4k..MP player opens to 9k, I have KQo and consider another 3b.  But I am on the BTN and just feel that at some point someone will play back at me with Ax and I obviously have to fold to a 4b.  So I wimp out and flat.  There also was a fishy big stack in the BB so that contributed to the flat.  BB obliged by calling.  Flop comes KT4ccc and BB leads straight out for 18k into ~30k pot.  MP folds and I call (we start the hand with 140k and BB covers by a decent amount).  Turn is an offsuit 7.  Now BB open ships..WTF?  I have Qc so unless he has Axcc I am live here.  My sense was that he would do this with Acx for bare nut flush draw, most K and obviously anything better than 1 pair including a flopped baby flush.  I decided to call pretty quickly as I felt that if I won this hand I would have a great shot at winning the tournament.  He had J7cc and I missed river for a 300k pot.  Not sure I like the call in hind sight as I was running the table pretty easily and picking up chips without any issue.

I then quickly hopped in the PLO at the 200/400 level and before too long had a nice sized stack.  Once we were close to the bubble (9 cashed) I picked up about 40k in chips just being aggro and picking on a few players who were clearly looking to cash.  We combined at 10 and quickly were in the money and down to 4 or 5 handed.  At this point I had an aggro on my left and a really loose baddish player on my left.  So i was stuck playing rather tight.  Anyhow, nothing super interesting happened and when we were 3 handed they offered me a straight up chop event though I only had 225k in chips versus their 575k and 450k..."uh sure, I'll take that".  I normally don't love chopping but sometimes the deal is just too good.  Here is the linky (although we all got $2500 and this says slightly different payouts):

http://www.bluff.com/tournaments/event/2013-delaware-park-poker-classic-event-23-pot-limit-omaha-10k-gtd-2753-30638.html

So now in the last year I have 3 2nd place finishes in PLO based events but have yet to cross the finish line.  So off we go to Vegas with a bit more confidence.  Let's hope this is the summer of run-good.