Project Phaser: Phase 3.1 (Bay 101 $350) One Hand Wonder

We started with 10,000 in chips, blinds of 25/50 and 20 minute limits in the first event of the Bay 101 Open, $350 No Limit Hold'em. 162 players entered with 18 spots paying, 18th being $580, 1st being $16,050 and the others somewhere in between.

The tournament kicked off at 9:30 a.m. and for the first two hours nothing of note happened to me. I won a couple of small pots in standard ways, but didn't take anything to showdown.

On the second hand back from break with the blinds of 200/400 with a 400 big blind ante, I opened to 1,200 in middle position with 55. To my surprise I got 3 callers including the button and both blinds. To my delight the flop came down J 6 5 with two clubs giving me bottom set and almost certainly the best hand.

I fired out 2,500 into the 4,800 chip pot and only the big blind called. The turn was a 7 and as I was thinking about how much I was going to bet when my opponent led for 3,500. I had about 9,500 left in my stack and with 13,300 in the pot the only move was all in. I paused for effect and then ripped it!

My opponent snap called me and turned over K4 of clubs meaning 13 of the remaining 44 cards would make him a winner and 31 would send the pot my way. Sadly the river was a 3 and that was it for me.

Tomorrow I have $400 buy in No Limit Hold'em Monster Stack! Roar! I know we start with 25,000 chips, but not sure if the structure is the same. I hung around and played cash games and saw that they were down to 18 at 6 o'clock today meaning it took 7.5 hours to make the money. I presume it will take longer tomorrow.

In other news I won $1,600 in the cash games which would have been about 7th place money so it worked out that I got stuffed early.