Posted by Johnnymac 1:54 PM
The Golden Nugget Tournament

As I mentioned below, last Friday when we were in Vegas, Champ Canonico and I played in a small daily tournament at the Golden Nugget. I finished in 6th place out of 62 players and won $225 in return for my $73 investment. The format of the tournament was unusual in that the structure was limit holdem for the first hour, with blinds doubling every 20 minutes, then no limit after that continuing with the same blind structure. The buy-in was $30 + a $3 entry fee to the casino ($2500 tournament chips) and plus unlimited $20 rebuys during the first hour and an add-on at the break ($1500 tournament chips each time). Something I found rather unusual about the tournament was that players were allowed to make an immediate rebuy before the first hand even started, kind of like an add-on at the beginning. Nearly all of the other players took advantage of this offer, so not wanting to be short-stacked from the beginning I also spent the extra $20. I don’t know why this was allowed or offered (the rebuy threshold was $1500 the rest of the time), but everyone else acted as if it were perfectly normal.

I will spare the details of how I got there, but I eventually made the final table. At this point I had $16,000 relative to the biggest stack who had upwards of $80,000. The blinds were $3,000/$6,000 and we were playing no limit by this point. It was ugly, but I was lucky enough to draw the button at the final table and even more lucky to look down at my cards and see KJo. As I was still two spots out of the money and had the shortest stack I knew that I was going to have to play fast and hope to get lucky if I wanted any chance of seeing any prize money. KJo from the button – even though I usually think of it as a mediocre “sucker’s hand” most other times – seemed to be my best chance to make something positive happen, so on the first hand of the final table I went all in. Situations and hands like these are the main difference between tournament play and cash play, for sure. The largest stack was the only player left in the pot and the blinds folded to my raise, so if I won I was going to do slightly better than doubling up. I caught a King on the flop, his queen high missed, and I was in a much different situation.

By chip count alone I was now in the money and I changed gears quite dramatically. Now that I had gotten lucky and was no longer “guaranteed” an out of the money finish, my strategy shifted from aggression to patience. I wanted to let the other short stacks fight it out among themselves until I was forced to play again. I had enough money to pay the blinds for a few more rounds, so I sat back and didn’t play a hand for more than two orbits around the table. In fact, just so I wouldn’t be tempted to play a hand and possibly take a loss, I didn’t even look at my cards for this entire time. For 21 hands I simply threw my cards right back to the dealer as soon as it was my turn to act. I may have been dealt AA 21 times in a row for all I know, but I wanted to finish in the money and I didn’t want to be tempted into possibly losing chips and going back to being the shortest stack. I had written off winning the tournament – I only cared about getting some money back.

Eventually the two other short stacks were eliminated, as I was hoping, and I was back in the big blind with a guaranteed share of the purse. Surprisingly there were no raises against my blind and three other callers. I looked down and saw AQo and made a small pot sized raise. Two players folded and the third, who had just barely more chips in his hand than I did, came over the top for the rest of my chips. Normally I never call a raise preflop with AQ unless it’s suited, but I remembered back to an earlier stage in the tournament when this particular player had made some very aggressive moves with marginal cards and I figured that there was at least an even money chance that his cards were worse than mine and not AA, KK, or AK. I called and was delighted to see that he had come over the top of me with… AJo. Quite an aggressive move on his part. He was dead to the 3 remaining jacks and soon I had doubled up again. He, on the other hand, was down to less than $10,000 in chips and was eliminated on the very next hand.

I returned to very tight play for the next 30 minutes and soon the blinds were again high enough to cause me some pain. During this time a lot of players in the tournament went all-in but only one was eliminated. Soon I was in the big blind again, which by this time was $10,000 and worth about 1/3 of my stack, but there were two raises in front of me and I mucked my 72o, figuring that the next hand from the small blind would certainly have better cards and provide me one last chance to get lucky. The blinds changed, however, after this big blind hand and I was now in the small blind for exactly the same amount of money except that this time it was now about half of my stack. Now I was going to be forced to go all-in and I looked down to see nothing more than a measly 95o. All of the other players had folded to me and the big blind, so I shrugged and threw the rest of my chips into pot. The man in the big blind to my left was by now the largest stack and pondered his move for a long time. He finally called and upon seeing my cards declared, “I sure wish you had shown me a different card!” before showing me his… 92o.

“I need a deuce!” he declared and amazingly he got one on the flop and I was soon eliminated.

I have no idea why he called: there are only three possible hands that I could have held that would be considered worse than what he was holding (83o, 82o, and 72o), but he did call and he got lucky. But I played smart and strategically and am rather proud of myself for finishing in the money in my first Las Vegas tournament. Not to mention that it was the first tournament money I have won in almost a year. I’m not complaining.

So that’s the story of the tournament itself. I will have some random snippets and stories and lessons to share in my next post.

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