Boy, what a feeling. When you run through a dry spell you start to question whether you really can play this game or not. Through the past month or so I had exactly zero cashes in MTTs. This was through a combination of bad luck and bad play. When I was getting to the bubble with solid play, I would make a stupid move. When I made the right moves early, I’d go busto from getting drawn out on. My tournament cash percentage dropped from just under 24% to right at 21%.
Combine poor results with poor bankroll management (I bought straight into a few of the big Sunday tournaments) and my once-rosy 2006 was looking more and more like a break-even proposition. For somebody who had a breakout 6 month period to start the year and who did not think that those results were due to an upswing in variance alone, it was kind of depressing.
So last night as I’m going deep into the 10k on FullTilt, I decide to take a flier in the 20k and call two all-ins with 98s even though I was still right at avg with almost half the field gone. Basically I was chip dumping or getting lucky enough to just start punishing people with a big stack. Why? Well because I really felt good in the 10k and wanted to concentrate on that. I probably should have just kept playing both of course since I was playing well. At the time though I just had a feeling to stick to the one. The funny thing is that both my cards were live and I ended up flopping an openended straight draw as well. I missed though and now was fully engrossed in the mission at hand.
I was playing very solid and staying just under average until we were near the bubble. People were not busting very quickly and I was getting short with an M around 4. It was folded to the SB who only completed so I pushed with A2s. The call came with A8os and I needed a suckout to survive. It came in the form of a beautiful 2 on the river and I was still on life support but at least had a glimmer of hope. I was able to catch some cards and get some bad calls against me to where I actually was above avg again. It was still not a lock though as we were about 30 from the money and the blinds were such that an avg stack had an M just a shade under 8.
to be continued…..
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