I just finished third in the Caesars event.  This tacks another $20,000 score onto my resume, but I feel a stronger sense of disappointment than accomplishment in the wake of the tournament.  I honestly thought I was going to win the thing.  Am I turning into a spoiled brat?

When play resumed with 12 players left, I was the chip leader.  I won two sizable pots immediately, and when we settled in to play the final table, I was way out ahead of the field.  Then, seated at a full final table with a gradually graded prize structure, I struggled through a long drought of trash hands.  I surmised that the only proper strategy was patience.  I picked a few spots here and there and mostly withstood my restealing urges, basically folding my way down to three-handed.

At that point in time, I was the second largest stack.  In the very first hand of three-handed play, with the blinds at 16,000-32,000 I openraised the button to 85,000 with A-8 offsuit, and the small stack in the big blind shoved for around 350,000.  I was sitting on around 700,000, which turned out to be the deciding factor in my decision to gamble with the short stack, who had been playing pretty tight.  I made the call.  The small stack (and eventual winner) had A-J, and it held up.  A few hands later I ran another A-8 into A-K, and that was all she wrote. 

I feel like a lot of less accomplished players might have donked off their chips earlier.  Still, I felt like I was the chalk in this thing and should have figured out a way to win it.

Oh, and for those of you keeping score at home, I drove through a nasty storm and made it to Philly just in time for tipoff.  Cornell beat Penn in a squeaker before a surprisingly fiesty crowd at the Palestra. 

And thus ends a blog entry by a guy whining about winning 20 grand.  🙂