5th place out of 90 isn’t good enough.
Originally published at shanefitzsimmons.com. You can comment here or there.
Won $13.50 in a 90 player tournament today for getting 5th place. That sucks. I was in first place for a good 15 minutes there, and then I started bleeding chips and got killed as a result of a bad kicker. That blows, I have to say. What really sucks is when you’ve invested an hour or more of your time into a tournament only to get involved in a hand where you’ve got top pair, and the game is so short handed that any pair is a great hand for you, but you still know this is going to be the hand you go out in. I’ve been in this situation many times, where I know I’m beat on the flop, and I’m facing a big raise, and my only chances are to go all-in and hope he folds, or go all-in and hope my kicker catches a pair of its own should he call. But even so, I usually have a pretty good sixth sense about when I’m on a hand that I’m about to bust with. Sucks a lot. Sucks worse when it’s a hand you didn’t even want to play with to begin with, but for some inexplicable reason you just do.
To someone who doesn’t know much about poker, it may seem like an obvious fold then. But that’s the trouble, because no matter what the hand, there’s at least a 10% chance your opponent is bluffing. That 10% nags at you, and it sucks when you’ve been given an opportunity to double up only to fold against a big raise, only to have them show you their bluff. That gets to you.
Oy. So I played 8 tournaments today. The buy-ins for all of them totals to $26.30, and my win of $13.50 minimized my losses by half, but it’s still a loss for the day. The sucky thing is had I won this tournament, which I had a real shot at doing, I would’ve won over $70.
Oh well, that’s poker.