FTOPS X Final Thoughts

Sorry about the lack of update on the last two events. I got a little burned out on blogging in the past few weeks.

In the $129 Knockout I gave myself a chance to go deep. After losing 60% of my chips 5 minutes in I figured it was going to be an early exit. But two hours later I hadn't gone broke or picked up any chips. Then I went on a total tear. By the time we were down to 1,000 players from the 7,000 we started with I was in 6th place. But as we approached the money (which was the top 720) I had A TON of moves backfire on me.

One of my big strengths (which has come from the experience of playing thousands of tournaments) is going after other players with total air because I know the situation is right. Normally when I have a big stack and we're getting close to the money I'm very good at running over the table (no matter what cards I get) without making it too obvious (you can't just raise every hand and expect to get away with it no matter how many chips you have). This time it seemed like every time I made a play someone played back at me. So by the time we'd made the money I was back to average, and went broke soon after when I made a bold, but solid play and ran into a big hand. I busted 3 people along the way (which isn't very many at all given I went from 5,000 chips at the start to over 120,000 at one point), and made a net profit of $138 (including the knockouts) for the tournament.

In the $535 event I went broke in very unusual fashion. Specifically I lost with AA to 23! That's not something that happens every day, and I bet 99% of the time it happens it's because someone slow played their aces. I, on the other hand, actually raised more than I normally would have and the guy with the 23 wasn't even in the blinds!

We started the tournament with 7,500 chips and I had about 6,000 left. The blinds were 50/100 and I raised to 350 in first position. I got called by 4 players in the field and the big blind! ACK! The flop came a bunch of junk with 2 clubs. I bet the pot and everyone folded around to the button who moved all in for about 10,000. I called, he had 23 of clubs, a club showed up and that was it.

In the end I took my $10,000 starting bankroll and turned it into $36,565. Of course all of that profit came from one tournament and if I hadn't played that one the FTOPS would have resulted in a fairly substantial loss.

At the start my goal was to have 4 cashes and one final table. I ended up playing 15 events which was a few less that I had originally planned (the fact that a ton of the tournaments started at 6 p.m. stopped me from playing more), so I'm happy to have had 3 cashes and of course my second place in the $256 PLO felt wonderful.

According to the FTOPS X leader board I tied for 67th place in terms of the player of the series competition. That's pretty cool since there were probably around 15,000 unique users that competed in the FTOPS.

Unlike the WCOOP the FTOPS is a twice a year thing (I think), and I know ultimate bet which has just joined forces with absolute poker runs a similar (but certainly smaller) set of tournaments which I've been meaning to check out. So before you know it I'll be back in the action. For now it's back to the daily point grind. I'll try to put up a hand of the day or two this week.

In conclusion I want to just add...SECOND PLACE! $33,000 BITCHES!