Matt's Post Day 4 E-mail

Here's what Matt had to day after day 4:

I've heard that some of you are following the action online. That's pretty cool. I actually called Dave to tell him about a hand I was involved in, and before I could tell him about it, he told me he had read the hand online. Pretty cool.

So yes, I am still alive. We are down to 189 players. I am guaranteed $38,600.

The bad news is that I did not make too much forward progress in my chip count. I ended the day with 308,000, and the average stack right now is about 750,000. That means that I have my work seriously cut out for me tomorrow. But as I keep telling myself, anything can happen as longas I'm still in.

I was down as far as $200,000 but then made some upward progress from there.

I also moved all-in at one point with A-K on a flop of 10-5-3. Thankfully I was not called.

The sickest hand (which is the one that was broadcast on www.pokernews.com) went as follows. With the blinds at 4,000-8,000, the first player made it 20,000 to go. Three people called, which was really unusual, since our table wasn't typically loose. When it got to me in the small blind, I found pocket queens. There was already over 90,000 in the pot, and I felt that the only player I really had to worry about was maybe the original raiser, or maybe the first guy that called him. Anyway, I raised to 140,000. When it got back to the first raiser, he immediately looked at me and said, "How much does he have left? 240,000? Ok, I'm all in." The next guy folded what he said was pocket jacks. The next guy calls with what turned out to be ace-king. The next guy folded, and I just couldn't see how I could call in that spot. I was 90% sure he had aces, or else I figured he had to have at least pocket kings to move in so quickly. At any rate, I folded, at which point he turns up king-queen offsuit. It was a sick and bizarre play, and the worst part is that it cost me a HUGE pot. If he folds instead of making that wacky play, I'm probably getting called by the jacks and the ace-king, and given that the board never had a card higher than nine, I could easily have gotten up to 900,000 from that hand. Instead, I was down to 240,000 and fighting for my life. In fact, I still am. We're coming back to a brief period of 5K-10K blinds, and then it goes up from there.

I've said it four times, so I might as well say it a fifth: I'm clearly an underdog to make it through tomorrow. I will need to get very lucky and catch some cards, or make some plays against some really good players, or else I might not be around very long. But I've made it this far, so who the hell knows, right?

Play starts at noon tomorrow. They have running updates on www.pokernews.com and I think also on www.worldseriesofpoker.com for anyone who is interested.

If I somehow make it through, then we will be looking at some REAL money. That, as Dave says, would be some shit.



Good luck Matt!