Saturday Tourney TR:
Last night was my first Saturday dinner tourney, and it went like gangbusters. I filled the 20 advertised seats at $25 a head. It was awfully tight on my 2nd table (60" round), especially since all the big guys seemed to draw those seats. I was extremely distracted when the tourney started - it took much longer than I budgeted to clean the room, set up the game, and shop/prep for dinner. On top of that, work has been kicking my butt lately, so I've already got a large sleep debt accumulated. But in spite of it all, we got going only ten minutes past the scheduled start time.
Dinner worked well and drew praise from everyone. For $10 per person, we had pulled pork sandwiches, hot dogs cooked in beer & kraut, veggie crudites, chips with salsa & guacamole, cookie bars, plus plenty of beer & soda. I had three people bail for other dinner options, one busted out before dinner, and two people didn't pay me. I didn't keep track of who was giving me money, though, so I don't know who the two culprits were. I ended up absorbing some of the cost, but it wasn't a big deal. I overbought and ended up with a lot of extra food & drink, plus enough plastic cutlery and Solo cups to take care of the next half dozen tourneys, so it's a wash. Plus, I learned some lessons about adjusting how much I buy and keeping track of who has & hasn't paid for next time.
I usually have a good memory for key hands in a tourney, but I was worn out and distracted by hosting and TD duties, so it took everything I had just to focus on one hand at a time. On top of that, it was a much longer tourney than our group is used to playing. Including the 45-minute dinner break, we ran just over 7 hours. I didn't get fancy, just ABC TAG most of the night, and I picked up enough good hands and lucky breaks to get heads-up at the end. Unfortunately, by this point I had 3bb left and my opponent had me outchipped 9:1, so the entire HU match lasted one hand. I had a queen, he shoved with a better queen, and that was that.
One interesting event occurred. For the first time that I recall with this group, a player called clock on another player during the tourney. One of our guys plays more cash than tourneys, and he can be extremely slow when making even non-critical decisions. "The Thinker" had been reraised for a large chunk of his stack, and he went into the tank for 3-4 minutes. Finally, one guy (we'll call him Shades) had enough and called clock, I counted Thinker down, and he folded at the last second.
So I thought it was over, but no. One of our regs is a fun, uber loose player who gets along with everyone in the group. He also likes to drink when he plays, and he's a bit of a silly drunk. So just a few hands after this happened, Thinker and I were involved in a decent pot where I had raised his flop c-bet and he had been thinking for under 30 seconds. Drunky McFun, looking to stir the pot, says, "Hey, can I call clock on him? I want to call clock." I told him
twice, "You can, but are you really sure that you want to do that?" Of course, he kept answering yes, so I sighed and told Thinker that he was on the clock again.
Thinker
exploded. He slammed his cards into the muck, cursed at me, Drunky, and Shades, and then started silently stewing. For the next couple orbits he just sat there with steam coming out of his ears, then he made a couple under-his-breath comments about Shades. Somehow, this had become all his fault even though Drunky was the one who twisted the knife. Shades was having none of this, and there were some words, but we got everybody calmed down and nothing happened. Later that evening, I had a chat with Thinker and I think he understands that the first clock was deserved, and that he was out of line for lighting into Shades over Drunky's needling. Crisis averted.
A few bustouts started the .25/.25 NLHE cash game when we merged to the final table, and it had been running five-handed for a couple hours when the tourney winner and I jumped in. After playing ABC TAG for several hours in the tourney, I cut loose in the cash game, seeing lots of flops with a wide range of hands. I caught fire quickly and grew my 160bb buy-in to 240bb. Then came the biggest pot of the night.
Thinker is to my right and just barely has me covered. He's on the BTN and pops a straddled, unopened pot to 12bb. I'm in the SB and look down at AKo, and I repop to 30bb. Folds around, he thinks for maybe 20 seconds while playing with chips, and he looks like he's trying to get a read. Finally, he
slams a 4-bet of 75bb on the table.
At this point, I'm putting him on AQ+/88-QQ. I think aces or kings are unlikely; he's not very good at tanking to deceive, and his tank after my 3-bet was genuine. I'm tied or behind most of his range, but I think I can fold out 88-TT and maybe JJ with a shove, and if I get a call I'm racing. So I put the rest in there - 240bb total. Again he tanks, maybe a minute this time, but he talks himself into a call. The board runs T-rag-rag-rag-Q, no straight or flush, and I'm convinced I've lost since the AQ got there and that's the only hand I had him on that I was ahead of. I table, he just looks at it, then shows me an ace and says, "You got it." Yowza.
After that hand, I could do no wrong. My bluffs/semi-bluffs were getting folds, and my value bets were getting called. And in a hand straight out of Larry's playbook, I see a free flop from the BB with J
4
. The flop comes J44, and I get the stack of a player who had limped pre with 24o.
By about 3:30am, eyelids were drooping, so we called last orbit. At cashout I had about half the chips on the table for a 660bb win. Apparently the RUNGOOT is docked for an extended stay in Florida.
tl;dr - FU, it took me half an hour to write this, you can take 3 minutes to read it.
Two Plus Two
) so we had to use one of the jokers instead. I guess they were stored in poor condition. Colors were super faded as well. 
Linear Mode
