Well, I managed to accomplish my two goals last night. I won a hand and didn’t bust out first. That honour belonged to hdouble. And I won far more than one hand. For the first three levels, all I had to do was raise before the flop – sometimes with good cards, sometimes with not, but at a reasonable frequency – and then raise again post-flop and sometimes post-turn for the few people left in the pot to walk away. Only once was I forced to fold when someone came back over the top of me, and I never showed down a hand. I wasted a few good down cards this way, but the flop never hit me, so it ended up working out.
Of course, once one of the other tables broke up and we had an influx of new players, this strategy didn’t work so well as Chris Halverson came back over the top all-in when I tried it. So, now I was going to have to start to play. Of course, that didn’t last long as I got deep into a pot chasing the nut flush with Kc9c. Not sure why I let that happen, but after the turn, I committed most of my remaining 550 against the 4000 pot. No luck for me and I was left with a piddly 15 chips. UTG I went all-in with Ks4s and went out of the tournament in 14th place out of 28. So, I made it past the halfway mark, which was much better than I hoped for, though at one point I had doubled my starting chips and actually began to think I might luck into the money.
TruePoker, the site that kindly hosted the tournament, was an interesting change from the Party/Empire interface, but there were a few frustrating quirks. The biggest in my books was the insta-all-in feature. If someone went all-in and was called and cards were turned face up, the remaining cards were dealt instantly and the pot pushed to the winner. No drama whatsoever, and you often lost the pot before you even realized what was going on. In one instance, I saw a river 7 to go with my pocket pair before the cards disappeared and heard the dealer’s voice call a flush while pushing the chips to my opponent. And to round out the “unique” complaints for Felicia‘s over/under:
– fast blind structure
– breaks cut into the time for that level
– insta-all-in
– voices got annoying (particularly the disconcerting robot laughter)
– bet slider (the buttons were slightly better, but I don’t understand why you can’t just type your bet)
– no tournament lobby to view progress
– hard to decipher bet amounts (it was difficult to see how many chips people had put in, particularly at the far side of the table, and there was no way to have this always-on like you could for player names and chip amounts)
– hand histories only available 10 at a time.
My thanks to Iggy for setting the tourney up, and Felicia for setting up the chatroom afterwards so I could talk to some of the bloggers that I didn’t get a chance to play with during the tournament.
Great tourney! It was definitely one of the most enjoyable times I’ve ever had playing online!