Tick Tick Boom

The Game: Ameristar $120 buy-in NLHE Thursday night tournament, 49 entrants.

Result: 1st place, $1928 cash. My second biggest tournament cash to date.

I didn’t actually win 1st place outright, but there was a 4-way chop at the end and I got the full 1st place prize money because I had a crushing chip lead over the other three players. I held something like 70% of the chips in play when we were down to four.

How it went down: Nothing spectacular throughout the tournament. I did not deliver a single bad beat, and no one delivered a bad beat against me. I was all-in only twice, when I open-pushed at the 100-200 and 150-300 levels when he blinds were very high relative to all stack sizes. No callers both times, so my tournament life was never at risk in any hand. Every contested pot was for less than my entire stack.

Keys to this tournament: In live play, I play cash games much more than tournaments. The only time I play live tournaments is in Vegas and in the Ameristar tournament maybe 3-4 times per year. As a result, I feel that my read is best in live cash games. So, I went into this tournament with the intention of focusing on my reads, as I do in cash games, to improve this aspect of my game.

It was primarily due to a sensitivity of stack size compared to style of play. I focused on identifying players’ styles, and then balancing that against stack size. There were situations where I avoided confrontations with smaller stacks who were prone to be more aggressive and play back, and be more on the attack against bigger stacks who were generally weaker players.

I would fold some strong hands that I might normally raise with pre-flop, when I had the sense that someone was ready to call or re-raise. I focused on the “look to the left” skill – looking around left at the players remaining to act to get a sense of their strength before I looked at my cards. Most everyone else looked at their hands before it was their turn to act, and they were giving off tells, or at least some aura of strength or weakness that I could just feel. It sounds like New Age mumbo-jumbo, but it was really working – I was predicting (to myself) with amazing accuracy who was strong and ready to pounce. I avoided a lot of trouble and coasted through the mid-levels by doing this.

The Key Hand: When we collapsed to the final table with 9 players, the Villain was a 60-ish woman wearing a red leather cowboy hat. She had a dominant chip lead with maybe 14,000 and everyone else was somewhere between 3000 to 6000. But, she played a big stack horribly. Her problem was that she hardly played at all, and when she did play she was usually out of position and her hand values were relatively weak for all-in confrontations. She would occasionally raise in EP with a hand like KJ, and then call a small stack push who had AJ. Worse, she would fail to call with tremendous pot odds in multi-way pots (ex. 700 call with one teensy stack all in, when the pot was already 3000+), with the opportunity to check it down and knock out the small stack. She continually made bad plays out of position and I got the sense that she came to the final table with a big stack due to luck. So she was the target, if I got the chance.

Despite her weak plays, she managed to collect an even bigger stack after winning some races. I won a few decent hands as the players dwindled, and Villain and I each knocked out two players. Down to five players, she and I were close as the big stacks, but I had her covered, and the other three were short.

At the 700-1400 level, she opened UTG for 4500. I was next to act and had two red kings. The moment I had been waiting for. How to get her stack in the middle? I intentionally fumbled around with a raise, and made it look like I was weakly making a min-raise, but intentionally made it 1000 (two orange chips) short. The dealer called this out, and I tossed the other two chips in. She was watching this act. My read was that she had Ax. The plan was call a push, or push myself if she checked, on any flop that didn’t have an ace.

The flop was T-9-6 rainbow, and she quickly pushed. I called and she showed A8-hearts. Perfect. I held up, and had about 70% of the chips. The other players quickly worked out the deal and I took the full 1st place prize.

Question: When the initial deal idea was raised, the other players all quickly pointed out, “You get 1st place money. You can’t finish any better than that!” But could I have gotten more than 1st place money in a deal? Is this ever done? Do players ever use extreme big-stack deal leverage to squeeze better than 1st place money out of a deal – pay me better than 1st place money, or no deal? My equity in the remaining prize pool was about $2800 based on my stack size, but they were correct that I could not win more than $1928 if we played it out. They each got about $700 in the deal, but 3rd and 4th place money was somewhere around $600 and $400, respectively, so my leverage would have been their individual risk of losing about $300 by playing on. I would have looked like a greedy hog for even trying, but I’m still curious if this would have worked.