Well, yesterday was a pretty nice little afternoon (and night). Didn’t have time to get to Home Depot or Bed Bath and Beyond, but I did manage to take 38th in the Pokerstars Sunday Million.

38th - Good for just over $3,400

Which constitutes my biggest cash to date. At least money cash, otherwise I would have to count the $25k Bellagio entry. Anyway…that fact seems kinda sad for as long as I’ve been playing, except I just don’t play a ton, and have not played many big tournies. In fact this was my first Sunday Mil ever.

There were a little under 7000 entries this week. First place was 190k, but being card dead for 7 hours doesn’t help you get there. I pretty much played one of the best tournies I’ve played. I stayed more patient than I even knew I could. Avoided all kinds of marginal situations and waited until I knew I had the best of it. Which was especially hard since I was just not getting very many hands to play. When it was all said and done, I had only seen 6% of the total flops.

Stats looked like this:

During current Hold’em session you were dealt 473 hands and saw flop:
- 7 out of 54 times while in big blind (12%)
- 4 out of 55 times while in small blind (7%)
- 21 out of 364 times in other positions (5%)
- a total of 32 out of 473 (6%)

Pretty sick stuff. Granted, once you get even into the 2nd or 3rd hour, you just don’t see a ton of flops. A lot of raising, reraising and races. But trust me, I wasn’t even finding any good spots to steal.

It seemed that every time I had a mid ace, or a couple high cards that I wanted to steal with, I was either UTG or UTG+1, or someone had already raised in front of me. I had to let go of a lot of hands because of that. My first double came with AA, and then the next was what seemed like 2 hours later with KK vs KK where I hit a miracle 4 flush. Didn’t even feel bad about it either, ha!

Continued to keep myself above water, pick up a pot here and there until I caught something big. The problem was that most times when I did pick up AK or something to play, I only won the blinds. Which helped, but you kinda like to use your big hands to win more than the blinds with. But who knows, maybe the lack of races helped me get where I did.

I did lose a big race relatively late, I forget the hand actually, but what I do remember is what happened after that. With blinds at 10k/20k, I had 50k left and I was UTG. I picked up Kd6d and knew that King high was probably as good as I was gonna get, and I needed to double while i still had 50k so it made a little difference.

So I went ahead and pushed with my K6 and got a call from late position. He shows KJ and I’m getting ready to say GG. The flop actually gave me a gutshot straight draw, so the entire rail was rooting for an 8 or a 6…. turn comes and it’s no help, but the beautiful river 6 gave me the win and boosted me back to 150k. Still insanely shorstacked, but at least I can wait for some semblance of a hand.

After that, I kept doing what I had been doing, avoiding bad spots and going with the few hands I got. I almost wish I took a shot to steal a little bit more when it got late, but the hands were just beyond bad. 92, 83 and the like. Things that just had no hope if I got a call. I wound up getting the stack up to over 800k at one point, though never was able to hit the 1m mark. Then I get moved onto GrinderMJ’s left, and he abuses me 2 orbits in a row in a blind vs blind confrontation where he just shoved on me both times. The blinds/antes were huge at this point, and I believe there was almost 150k in the middle every hand. So a walk or two would have been nice, but he had about 10x my stack, so I probably would have done the same thing. Unfortunately I never got better than 9 high when he did that.

After that point my chips were just bleeding away, I had about 450k left when I finally picked up an Ace. It was only A2, but it’s the best I had seen in probably 4 or 5 orbits. So I went with it. Got an instacall from the button with AT and couldn’t suckout this time.

Wound up finishing 38th. Which on one hand feels good, considering that it’s my biggest money cash, and at the time, I really needed it. But on the other hand, you don’t get that close every day, some people never get that close, so it’s pretty disappointing to come up short. I was really hoping to take it down, call work, tell them I quit, and TP/MM ya know? Instead I didn’t sleep too well, and called in sick today because I just didn’t feel like going in.

At least I have a BR now, even after cashing a bit out. Maybe I can start to grind that up and get there anyway. If anything, the confidence boost from something like this is huge, and I know I have it in me to take it deep in a monster tournament. Not bad for a first try.