It has struck again.  Other than a few weeks about 1.5 years ago, my trip to Vegas last October, and the annual Superbowl poker tournament I play in with friends, I have focused my attention elsewhere since my last trip to the WSOP Main Event in 2006.  For better or worse, I started following poker again in my news feeds and the hype of the 2009 WSOP caught up with me.  The 2009 Main Event just whittled down to the “November Nine” with 2 major pros surviving to the final table including the Tiger Woods of poker, Phil Ivey.  So I decided to give it a go this past weekend.

Considering the rust that certainly exists in my poker game, I decided to just play using “FTP” points that I had accumulated from back when I was playing more regularly.  I had used the vast majority of the reward-like points for acquiring poker paraphernalia, such as a nice poker chips-set and a few poker books, but still had a few thousand FTP points to mess around with.  I promptly won a 90-person satellite tournament Saturday night which gave me entry into a bigger tournament the next day.  A much bigger tournament.  Full Tilt was attempting to set a record for the largest tournament in history with a 50,000 person tournament.  My buddy Brian also won a seat into it and I was really looking forward at turning my $0 entry into potentially $45k (1st place money).  I mean, there were only 49,999 players standing in my way — how could I lose?  Well… it wasn’t to be as I made a few bad plays, had little to work with card-wise, and then I managed to get all my chips in the middle, drawing dead, about 30 minutes into the tournament.  Oh well!  Brian lasted awhile longer though he too didn’t have much to work with, either.

Not one to let a stupid mistake hold me back, I decided to enter a much smaller, more standard tournament: a 90-person, knockout-style, tournament.  Knockout means you get a bounty for each player you knock-out.  This reduces the pain of the buy-in if you place out of the money but manage to take out a few players before you bust-out though obviously it reduces the prize pool a bit for those that DO make the money (the top 9 finishers).

I managed to hold steady at above-average in chips much of the tournament but when it got down to around 20-30 players, I made a move into 3rd-6th in chips.  I continued to play well and we eventually got down to around 12 people remaining.  At this point, I took a nasty beat and dropped from 3rd to 11th in chips.  My persistent ability to bubble out of tournaments seemed ready to rear it’s ugly head and remind me why poker is not a game for their faint of heart.  I struggled and struggled and managed to outlast several opponents and somehow squeaked into the top 9 and the money.  Then I made another run and moved from 9th to 2nd in chips though the chip leader had everyone vastly outchipped with a monster stack.  Steadily, players started dropping until it was just 3 of us.

The (one-time monster) chip-leader had about 120k in chips, I had ~90k, and the 3rd place guy had about ~30k.  The blinds were astronomical and aggression and a willingness to risk it all had been the status quo for the last 15 or so players and that continued.  Eventually, I got the 3rd place stack all-in drawing slim as he made a stand with A9 vs my AQ.  The 9 on the flop was devastating.  Then, my KK was cracked by the same players Ax.  This second blow dropped me well down in chips such that I had to virtually go all-in every 2nd hand for several hands in a row though passive play from the other two players helped me recover a bit.  Eventually, I worked back up to equal in chips to the other smaller stack and we got it all-in again, this time with me holding AA against his A2 — an overwhelming favorite and I put him out of the game.

The chip-leader had been playing pretty passively 3-handed but had picked it up shortly before I knocked out 3rd place and had me outchipped by a significant margin which expanded as I was getting nothing but rags.  That said, he wasn’t the strongest player I had ever faced and despite the massive blinds forcing a lot of aggressive push-and-hope moves, I managed to slowly chip up and then double-through him.  This left us about equal in chips for the next hand.

Blinds were 500/1000 with our stacks both around 120k, him slightly ahead.  Realizing I had enough chips to try and outplay him post-flop which plays to my advantage since I felt I was a much better than the other guy, I limped in from the button with Qc6c.   He bumped it up to 25k, a modest raise considering the blinds and my limp, so I called to see if I could catch the right flop w/ my modest hand.  A flop of Q x x wasn’t as good as a 2-clubbed flop but I felt I had almost certainly had the best hand.  Not surprisingly, my opponent pushed all-in which helped confirm that he didn’t have a monster that had me beat.  99% certain I had the best hand, I called and he turned over a K J — no pair, no draw, and only 3 outs of 44 cards remaining to win — for this pot which represented 95+% of the chips in play — essentially, the tournament.

The turn:

It’s hard to be disappointed by a 2nd place finish in a decent-sized tournament when you’ve been away from poker for so long but it’s always heart-breaking when you get your money in as a significant favorite (~85% to win for me at this point) and are set to take away the grand prize.  That said, I had mostly avoided bad beats throughout the tournament (other than the two hands against 3rd place mentioned above) so I guess I’d rather the bad beats come once I’m in the money than earlier in the tournament.  Overall though, a 1st and a 2nd place finish isn’t a bad way to get started back into poker.