After a fitful night’s sleep, I made my way to the Rio Pokerdome and Table 143, Seat 1. Initially, I had three concerns: (1) I HATE sitting in seats 1 or 10 at a full table. You can’t see anything and you’re constantly worrying about protecting your hand from the dealer. Greg Raymer wrote something about this once, and he argued that seats 3,4 7, and 8 are the best seats since you can see everything without having to turn your head. But I digress.
(2) One of my secret lucky weapons, my ugly, royal blue and white slicker FILA jacket (known to all as simply “the FILA”) was immediately neutralized by two of the first four players to sit down at the table who, incredibly, ALSO sported ugly slicker FILA jackets. (note: I ended up losing the FILA later that day when I left it at my second table. It was never worn.)
(3) I was extremely, extremely nervous. Having not come close to qualifying online or elsewhere, it finally occurred to me moments before the main event that I might not be that good a tournament player. Fortunately, my angst was drowned out by a horrific rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, sung by a female poker pro who will go nameless. Shuffle up and deal!
During the first level, I played a beautifully textbook tight-weak game, seeing few flops and folding at the first hint of danger thereafter. I think I won one or two hand pre-flop and one hand with a continuation bet on the flop. At the end of the level, I was down to 9100. Most of the players at my table were online qualifiers, and the only two really good players appeared to seated on my left in seats 2 and 3, respectively. Seat 6 was overly aggressive and swung from 15000 to 5000 twice within the first level. He also stole my blinds six times in a row as Todd was quick to point out.
Seat 9 was a young Asian kid whom immediately became “that guy” due to his exaggerated facial expressions that mocked everyone’s play. (He's making one of these faces at left.) To his left, in seat 10, was a drunk New Yorker (with requisite Yankees lid, dangly cigarette and, incredibly, drunk railbirds) who took FOREVER to act. A typical hand played out like this: Seat 7 folds, seat 8 folds, seat 9 calls, seat 10 takes a deep breath, dramatically removes the chip from his card to look at his cards, looks at his cards, dramatically reapplies chips, crosses arms, exhales deeply, think, thinks, thinks (minutes go by), takes another swig from his 14th Miller lite and folds. It was ABSURD.
Seat 8 finally started calling the clock on him pre-flop, if you can believe that. Awesome. In hindsight, this ultimately worked in my favor as I was bleeding off chips at an escalated rate. Since we played about half as many hands as everyone else, I probably stayed in the tournament because of that jackoff.
In Level 2 I continued to hemorrhage chips. I called an unraised pot from the small blind with QTs and flopped two pair. I gave my opponent a freed card on the turn, and he made his straight on the river. Then, just to let everyone know how big a donkey I was, I called his pot-sized bet on the river. Dow to 8200.
In level 3, very little changed for me, but the tournament itself seemed to get out of the mud. With blinds at 100-200, people started to lose their minds and were making and calling huge bets. For example, the super aggressive guy in seat 6 raised pre-flop to 400 with around 5500 and the called another 1200 re-raise (or almost of fourth of his remaining stack) from the Asian kid in seat 9. The flop comes 9h 6h 5d. Seat 6 immediately goes all-in for his last 3800 or so. Seat 9 (who almost out-did seat 10 for time spent in the tank) finally called with pocket kings. Seat 6 turns over 7h.8h., for a flopped nut straight. Wow. Called off a quarter of his stack out of position with 78. Good flop for him. For good measure, he went ahead and made a straight flush on the river. At the end of Level 3, I was down to 7100.
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