This one didn’t go as well as my other recent big buy-in events. I made a few good hands, took a few bad beats, and was right around my starting stack of 30,000 when the following situation went down in Level Four. With blinds of 200-400 and a 50 ante, a tight-straightforward player opened for 1,400 UTG. I called UTG+2 with two queens, and a loose-ish, decent player called in late position. The rest folded. With 5,225 in the pot, we took the flop three-handed. It came J62 rainbow. UTG led out for 5k. I called. The LP player thought for a while, asked both of us how many chips we had (UTG had similar to me), and eventually raised to 20,000. UTG muttered and folded, and I had a decision. I had about 23k behind after calling the 5k, so i would be getting about 1.9-1 to put all my chips in. My read was that my opponent could have AJ as easily as a set, and so I would win the showdown often enough to show a decent profit getting my chips in. I don’t know if that read was right, but that’s what it was. It turned out my opponent had a set of deuces and I didn’t hit any miracles. Good game, me.
Another aspect of the hand is that there were two legitimate preflop choices. Even before the tournament I was going back and forth about what hands to reraise with and what hands to call with in spots like the above one. This is to say, I knew going in that by flat-calling preflop I risked going broke to a small set. I thought the benefits outweighed the risks as part of my global strategy, but I’m certainly willing to listen to counter-arguments.
I’m not sure yet what my next big brick-and-mortar tournament will be. My next focus will be on the FTOPS currently taking place. Good luck to all playing events in that series.
