Round 3

Saturday morning proves far more hectic than anticipated. There’s a surprising amount of turnover, meaning students who competed last night but who if they plan on coming at all today have not arrived as of 8AM. Frustratingly, I’m not getting good information from coaches about which of their students have not showed up.

I am used to leading by moral authority. When I ran the BDL, the coaches and students all saw how hard I worked, and most of them knew that I wasn’t paid. I more or less shamed them into making my job easier and doing what I told them to do.

Few coaches and even fewer students remain from my era, and most of the others had never seen me before yesterday. I try to catch up with them as they arrive to confirm which students would be competing today, but I get a lot of eye rolls and brusque “I don’t know, not everyone is here yet,” and despite my pleas to come find me in the tab room if they need to make any changes, no one reports to me despite plenty of changes that should have been made before the start of Round 3.

This results in something like six forfeited debates, with twelve students sitting and twiddling their thumbs for an hour and a half. Had I been on top of the no-shows sooner, I could have reconfigured the pairings so that these six teams debated each other, but instead they all got the morning off. Fine with them, I imagine, but from my perspective a lost educational opportunity. There’s a similar scramble to determine which of our volunteer judges has actually shown up and to replace those who have not.

Round 4

Even once Round 3 gets off the ground, we continue to work in the tab room updating the computer. In the interest of starting at least close to on time, we often made changes and substitutions on the fly, crossing out the names of no-show teams and substituting in judges. Now, to ensure that the computer has accurate information upon which to base the next round’s pairings, we must go through and update the tabulation program with the changes we’ve made by hand.

Debaters, coaches, and judges eat lunch while awaiting the announcement of the quarterfinal debates.

Round 4 seems to get off to a good start, until several coaches poke their heads into the tab room. Apparently two teams who missed round 3 have since arrived, ready to debate round 4. To be fair, we were told about this, but we failed to update the tabulation program accordingly. Now, as a result of our error (and, of course, the students’ own tardiness) they stand to miss both of today’s preliminary debates. It’s getting late to redo all of our plans for the coming round, so rather than reconfigure the pairings, I pit these teams against each other. One is from the Novice division and one the JV, so it won’t count towards the official results, but at least the kids will get to debate. All parties walk away satisfied.

This kind of quick, creative problem solving is my favorite part of running a tournament. There are constantly little fires like this to put out, and a good director will improvise solutions to all of them while keeping the great tournament machine chugging along smoothly. It requires seeing all of the options at your disposal and understanding the ultimate objectives, which are to run a fair, educational, and fun event. Are you starting to see the similarities with poker?

Consistent with my lead-by-moral-authority philosophy, I comport myself as tournament director with an air of hurried authority. I always walk briskly and purposefully, and if someone wants to come to me with a problem or concern, they better walk and talk and keep up. If I’m hunched over the computer, some try to wait for my full attention, but I let them know they aren’t getting it. I can’t afford to stop working, so tell me about the next problem while I’m solving the current one.

Quarterfinals

There’s a lot to do as Round 4 ends. Heretofore, rounds have been “lag paired”, meaning that in Round 4 teams are paired based on their results from Rounds 1 and 2, enabling us to pair Round 4 while round 3 is underway. Now that we’re about to start the quarterfinals, we need the results of all four preliminary rounds to determine the top eight teams in each division.

Once all the data are in, we have to double-check everything up to this point to ensure that the proper teams advance. A few of our last-minute changes have produced some irregularities in the results, data that weren’t properly recorded. All of this must be verified and fixed before pairing the quarterfinal round.

To buy time for this extra bit of tabulation, we coordinate it with lunch. The kids fuel up on sandwiches and cookies while we pore quickly but thoroughly over the results, snatching bites of our lunch with any free second.

Despite this forty-five-minute hedge, we fall behind schedule preparing the quarterfinals. Eager to make up for lost time, I grab the pairings as soon as they’re printed, run off a few copies, and tape them up strategically around the cafeteria.

A student quickly brings the problem to my attention: “What rooms are these rounds in?” Whoops. I was in such a rush that I neglected to assign rooms to the quarterfinal rounds. Elbert scrambles to scrawl numbers on the pairings and replace the incomplete copies I hung. Approximately sixty-three thousand people interrupt this process to point out that they don’t know which rooms they’re supposed to be in.

Awards Ceremony

Finally the quarterfinals are underway, but there’s no rest for the weary. The next item on the schedule is the awards ceremony (yes, we have the awards ceremony before the semifinal debates – these tournaments run long, and only a few kids need to stay for the last two rounds, so we arrange things so that the vast majority are ready to go by 5 PM), and there’s a lot to do to prepare.

Yours truly, on the verge of ruining the Novice division competition.

We have awards for not only the losers of the quarterfinals (the winners will get their trophies after semifinals or finals, depending on how far they make it) but also for the top individual speakers, for the schools with the most participating students, and for the best judges. Most of these awards are given in each of the three divisions and announced by a different individual, in the interest of including more people in the ceremony. I need to determine the winners of each of these awards and then distribute this information to the ten different presenters so they’ll have what they need for their part of the ceremony.

We also need a copy of each ballot from the preliminary rounds to distribute to each of the of the teams in each debate. That’s roughly 280 pieces of paper that need to be photocopied, front and back, and then separated into piles for each school.

It’s my own bright idea use BDL alumni in the awards ceremony. I love it when graduates of the BDL come back to serve as judges. In fact, they’re the only judges we pay, a policy that I began and that has lasted into the present day. These alumni often make for the best judges, because as former BDL debaters themselves who are now (mostly) in college, they are uniquely appealing as role models to the current debaters. They are also the judges least able to afford to volunteer. Many work two jobs to help pay for college, and no matter how much they’d like to, most can’t give up their Fridays and Saturdays for free.

Anyway, I asked some of these alumni to participate in the awards ceremony. The ceremony takes place in a large auditorium, and it turns out we have no microphone. The alumni, less experienced with speaking to large groups than am I, struggle on a number of levels. They speak far too quietly and quickly, and they don’t engage at all with the audience. This results in students only half paying attention to the awards and a lot of whispering and noise from the audience.

When it’s my turn to and announce the results of the Novice quarterfinals, I take the time to get everyone’s attention. “Are you ready to hear who won some debates?” Muttered yesses and grunts. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates, say yay-ah!” Now I’ve got some kids shouting back at me. I raise my voice and enthusiasm. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates, stomp your feet!” This time there’s a chorus of stomps. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates… shut up and stop talking so I can tell you.” Gales of laugher, and I know I’ve got them.

I draw out the announcements for full dramatic effect. “In the debate between X from school Y and A from school B, the winner is X. Team A, please come up to collect your trophies.” Repeat for the other three quarterfinal rounds. With each name announced, there’s uproarious cheering from one part of the room and groans from another.

Immediately after I announce the last of the results, one of the alumni judges rushes the stage. “Andrew! Andrew!” I lean over to talk to him. “You got that one wrong. You said the wrong team.” My stomach falls. He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t sure, but I ask him anyway. “Yes I’m certain, I judged it myself. That’s the team I voted for,” he says, pointing to the girls currently on stage collecting quarterfinalist trophies.

“Stay on stage a moment, ladies,” I tell them. They freeze, confused. “Let’s bring the other team up here as well.” Two boys in the front row, grinning from ear to ear, collect a few high fives as they come up on stage. “Guys, I’m really sorry, I just made a huge mistake. The other team are actually the winners.” The girls shriek with delight, while the boy’s teammates howl with laughter and point.

The boys, to their tremendous credit, take it like champs. They shake my hand and accept my sincere apologies gracefully. They hug their opponents as they take the quarterfinalist trophies. I’m embarrassed, but it could have been much worse if the judge hadn’t caught my error. The wrong team advancing to the semifinals would have been a disaster that couldn’t be undone.

Semifinals

Now, at last, the hard part is over. There’s a bit of a scramble to find judges for the semifinals, since it’s getting late and many volunteers are going home, but the time pressure is off. A good 70% of the students and coaches will leave now, and the atmosphere will be much more relaxed. It’s almost anticlimactic the way things quiet down even as the most important debates take place. It’s actually reminiscent of the atmosphere last days of the WSOP main event (thinly veiled brag), with most of the fanfare has wrapped up even though the stakes are the highest.

These kids don’t leave a lot of food behind, but lucky for me the vegetarian sandwiches are the least popular. I finally have time to get a meal and chat with the other volunteers. Much like many of our debaters, Elbert grew up in a poor family and joined the debate team at a high school that was otherwise rather lackluster, academically. He credits debate with opening his eyes to the world and getting him into college. He now works for the Federal Reserve combating fraud in military meal cards.

Finals

There are only six semifinal debates, so tabulating those results and pairing the three final rounds (one in each division) is a breeze. I decide to finally watch a bit of one of these debates I’ve been scheduling all day, so I sit in on the beginning of the Varsity finals.

It’s not a coincidence that two of the three students in the whole tournament whom I know are debating in this round. They are a brother and sister team, she a senior and he a junior, with a combined seven years of debate experience between them. They are also the only two white students at a high school in Roxbury, Boston’s historically black neighborhood where Malcolm X once lived. I don’t know their whole story or how they ended up there, but I have feeling that this experience has a lot to do with their facility for arguing.

“Tom” speaks first, delivering an eight-minute speech in favor of reviving the US space shuttle program. Apparently this is essential to secure US hegemony and eventually colonize space, ensuring the survival of the human race even in the event of catastrophe here on earth.

An excellent speech delivered from a makeshift podium.

If you’ve never seen competitive policy debate, you have no idea how much can be said in eight minutes. Tom is nowhere near the fastest, but he is nevertheless spitting out more than two hundred words per minute. Contrary to popular opinion, policy debate is not about public speaking. It’s about logic, evidence, and refutation, and there’s strong incentive to make as many arguments as possible in your allotted time.

The Negative team, two African-American girls from a high school in South Boston, does not look familiar to me, but they know their stuff. “Melissa” calls into question the ideology of colonization. According to her, the very idea is premised on notions of European superiority and entitlement to rule the entire world, dangerous ideas that ought not be extended into space. She also talks about budget cuts that funding the Affirmative’s plan might entail, but it’s evident that the critique of colonialism is the real meat of her team’s strategy.

The other two girls deliver their speeches, clashing over the meaning of colonialism and its importance relative to the threat of human extinction. These are strong speeches, but nothing remarkable.

It is Melissa who blows me away the next time she takes the “podium”, which is really just a chair stacked on top of a desk. Her team’s colonialism argument, though interesting, rests on some pretty complicated philosophical foundations. It’s a topic I’ve rarely seen argued well by college debaters, let alone by students at a high school that struggles to meet state literacy standards.

Yet Melissa knows what she’s talking about. She quotes William Spanos applying Foucault’s critique of disciplinary power to US foreign policy. She explains, clearly and in her own words, the parallels between the bloody European conquest of Africa, Asia, and the Americas and the Affirmative’s proposed colonization of space. It’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever seen in a BDL debate, and though I leave before the final three speeches, I have a sneaking suspicion that the round is over.

I head back down to the tab room to await the results of the Novice and JV finals. The less experienced debaters tend to finish their rounds more quickly, and sure enough they are waiting eagerly in the cafeteria for their results when the Varsity students finally finish.

An impressive number of debaters have stuck around. In addition to the twelve who were still competing in the finals, roughly twice that many friends and teammates remained to watch, learn, and cheer them on. The debate I watched was packed with spectators eager to learn from two of the best teams in the League at the top of their game.

Conversation drops off quickly when I walk purposefully to the front of the cafeteria. I announce the names of both teams who competed in the Novice finals and have them come stand next to me. They are all new to the activity, and while of course it’s exciting to be doing well, winning isn’t something they’ve dreamed of and worked at for months or years. A panel of three judges decided unanimously for the Negative, who cheer and hug each other as I distribute trophies.

Next I stand the JV finalists on either side of me. Once again, it’s a 3-0 decision for the Negative. The cheering is a little louder this time, and the disappointment of the Affirmative team more evident.

Things get really tense when I call up the Varsity debaters. “In the debate between New Mission High School and Excel High School,” I begin. You could hear a pin drop. Melissa is shaking nervously. I know that the brother and sister team have won tournaments before, but for all I know this could be a first for Melissa and her partner. I shuffle the three ballots in my hand. “Let’s see, here’s one ballot for the Negative.” Melissa starts squirming even more.

“Aaaand, oop, here’s one for the Affirmative!” I say with mock surprise, as though I haven’t already looked to see who won. The audience picks up on what I’m doing to the poor debaters and laughs knowingly. “So I guess this final ballot will decide it.” I pause and smile, to more laughter from the audience and almost uncontrollable shaking from Melissa and her partner. “The final judge voted Negative, meaning…” but the rest of my words are drowned out by squeals and shrieks as the two girls embrace.

Tom and his sister smile politely. They’re disappointed, but they’re one of the best teams in the League, and they know they’ll be back. They hug and congratulate their opponents as I thank everyone for coming and wish them luck in the next debate. A few of the coaches, on the way out, thank me for keeping things running smoothly. “Glad to be of help,” I tell them.

There are 174 high school students registered for the debate tournament I am running this weekend. Roughly 135 will actually show up to compete, but not all of those 135 will be among those who registered in advance. These students will compete Friday evening and all day Saturday. Most of them will, anyway – a few show up, without warning, on only one day or the other. Just as many will be competing simultaneously at another of our schools, most of which are not large enough to host so many debates at once. That other school is not my responsibility at all.

About half as many middle schoolers will debate in their own separate competition at my school on Saturday only. They are kind of but not really my responsibility.

When I stepped down, three and a half years ago, as executive director of the Boston Debate League (BDL), we were lucky to get 40 kids at a tournament. Obviously there was no need to spread them out across two sites. There were no middle school debaters.

There were no paid employees, either, unless you count the alumni of the league to whom I paid a small stipend to judge at competitions. We had a lot of volunteers, some of them quite committed, but I still did virtually everything myself. The new Executive Director was the BDL’s first full-time employee.

When he told me that he’d be out of town this weekend, I jumped at the chance to help out by directing the tournament at one of its two locations. Running tournaments was my favorite part of running the BDL. They were a high that invigorated me to push through the often boring work of fundraising, volunteer and Board recruitment, and league administration. I found an old blog entry from my days as director, in which I described the tournament experience thusly:

“All of this logistical work occurs amidst a blur of commotion: stomping feet, pounding music, beeping timers, and the din of young voices echoing through the vast hallways of this big brick schoolhouse. I puzzle over the constantly shifting matrix of school names and student initials, all the while incorporating last minute changes, pointing late arrivals vaguely in the direction of the auditorium, where donuts and coffee await them, and fending off unimportant inquiries and requests to “hurry, the students are getting restless.” It is as demanding as playing eight tables of poker at once, and I love every second of it.”

This tournament is much larger than the ones I used to run, but I’m not doing it alone. There’s a volunteer working the tournament tabulation program on a BDL-owned computer, another volunteer manning the judge desk, and two employees handling the logistics of feeding all these students, setting up awards, and otherwise ensuring that things run smoothly.

It’s a little unclear, at first, what exactly my role is aside from overseeing all this activity. It soon becomes clear, though, that none of these individuals is sufficiently experienced to know how to resolve efficiently and effectively the multitude of little issues that always arise at these tournaments.

For example, Elbert, the volunteer on the computer, has used the tabulation program only once before. It would surely be faster for me simply to take over for him, since I have to tell him how to do most things anyway, but I won’t be at future tournaments and he will. He’s a capable and dedicated volunteer, and time invested in on-the-job training for him is well worth it, even if it can get frustrating when things get hectic.

Things get hectic very quickly. Over the next hour and a half, debaters and their coaches trickle into the host school’s cafeteria where several aluminum trays stuffed with salad and pasta await them. My first job is to find the coaches and compare the roster they submitted earlier in the week with the list of students now physically present in the building. For the most part they’re ready with quick and clear information, but there are always a few question marks, students who are supposed to be coming but not yet here.

As I collect updated data from each school, I bring it back to the tabulation room (“tab room”, from now on) and help Elbert make the necessary changes. Everything goes smoothly enough except that five minutes before the pairings for the first round are to be released, one school has not yet arrived. I get the coach on the phone, introduce myself, and have her tell me how many teams she’ll have competing. We can figure out the names later; for now I just need the numbers to get the round paired.

In policy debate, students compete in teams of two. Thus, a school that brings ten students would usually have five teams. A school with nine students would also have five teams, with one student debating “maverick” or by himself. A school with ten students could actually have six teams, if two of their students aren’t getting along and insist on both debating solo. We discourage it, but it’s been known to happen.

The BDL offers three divisions of competition: Varsity, Junior Varsity, and Novice. The latter is a new addition since my departure, and to be honest I’m not clear on the distinction between Novice and JV. For my purposes, it doesn’t matter. I just need to know that they are distinct.

We’ll have two debate rounds, each about an hour and a half long, tonight. Teams will be paired randomly for these two rounds, with the caveat that teams from the same school will not be matched against each other.

There is one, very broad topic that students debate for the entire year. This year it has to do with the US federal government’s role in space exploration. Everyone must argue both for and against such exploration. If you’re Affirmative, arguing for it, the first round, then you’ll be Negative in the second. The computer, thankfully, handles all of this for us.

Elbert and I update team information for the school that is just now arriving and quickly print a pairing for the first round, just in time for the opening announcements. The cafeteria is large and bustling, and when it gets as quiet as it’s going to get I still have to shout to be heard. “Welcome to Tech Boston Academy! Thank you all for coming out to compete today. My name is Andrew, and I used to be the director of the League. I’m really excited to be here today, and I’m simply amazed by how many of you there are here. In my day we were lucky to get 30 or 40 debaters. I’m posting pairings now. Please make your way to your rooms immediately, rounds need to be underway in fifteen minutes.”

Two hundred students, coaches, and judges converge on the sheets of paper even before I’m finished taping them up on the wall. The complaints are quick to follow. “What team am I on?” “Do we have keys?”

The pairings identify teams by school name and a letter: “Tech Boston A”, for example. This is a change from my time, and one whose logic I don’t understand. Apparently students and coaches don’t yet know which team is which and need the tab room to give them a “key” that identifies which students are on which team. Elbert runs back to the computer to print these, and the coaches follow. Ultimately this is a set-back of less than minutes.

The bigger problem is that the judge table hasn’t done a great job of checking-in judges as they arrive. This means that we have only a vague idea of which of our registered judges is and is not actually here and available to judge a debate. We need at minimum one judge for every two teams, which means 35 judges for each round. Judging is technically part of the coaches’ job description, but they hate doing it and do have better things to do, so we use volunteers as much as possible. The drawback of this is that they can’t always be counted upon to show up when they say they will, and there’s nothing we can do if they don’t.

All we can do is put out ballots with the name of the judge scheduled to be in each round and then see which ones get picked up. We instruct all the other volunteers to stand nearby, ready to fill in as needed for those who aren’t actually present. This means that the last rounds to start are a good twenty minutes behind the first, and by the time I and one of the BDL employees walk the halls to ensure that each debate is actually underway, the round is half over.

Thankfully, Round 2 is paired randomly, meaning that the outcome of Round 1 won’t influence it and we can get started on it immediately. In fact, Elbert already has this underway when I get back to the tab room. What he doesn’t have is up-to-date information about which judges are here, which means that we once again have to do the print-and-substitute-as-needed method of judge assignment.

Still, Round 2 gets underway without too much drama, and then it’s time to enter the results from Round 1. We have to record both which team of two won and lost each debate and also speaker points awarded to each of the four students in the debate based on the quality of their individual performance. At the end of the day on Saturday, we’ll give awards to both the teams with the best win-loss records and the individual students with the highest speaker points.

Round 3 is going to be power-paired off of the first two rounds, meaning that teams that won their first two debates will be paired with other teams who also won their first two debates. Thus, we can’t begin pairing Round 3 until all of the results from Round 2 are in. Round 2 is the last one of the night, so students and coaches depart as they finish, until finally only the four of us remain at the school, working diligently in the tab room to prepare for tomorrow.

Elbert and I finish up the Round 3 pairing, which we know will have to change depending on which judges and debaters actually show up tomorrow. Meanwhile one of the other BDL employees sets up another computer and printer for the middle school administrators to use. I can tell from his sighs that it isn’t going well. “I keep getting this printer error,” he tells me.

I take over for him and mess around haphazardly with the printer configuration for a few minutes. He leaves the room to finish cleaning up the food in the cafeteria. I unplug and replug the printer’s USB cable. He returns to the sound of printing. “You’re a genius,” he tells me with a clap on the back. We’ve got the first, shorter day of the tournament under our belts.

Last night I was there for the second time in two days. My girlfriend has been cramming for the GRE and just had her bike stolen, so I wanted to get her a treat. At the bakery counter, they sell these mini chocolate mousse cakes that she likes.

The couple ahead of me in line were in their late 60′s. They looked lifelong outdoors people, he with scraggly beard, she with close-cropped hair and weather-worn face, both rail-thin.

There were two mousse cakes left in the display case. The woman behind the counter handed one to the old couple. “We need two, please,” the man corrected her. The last two.

The woman took out the other cake, inspected it for a moment, and then showed him a small blemish. Perhaps 0.5% of the icing had fallen off. “It’s a little broken, do you still want it?”

“We get a reduced price, right?” the man asked aggressively, leaning over the counter.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“It should be a reduced price, if it’s damaged.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t do that. We donate imperfect items to the food kitchen, we don’t ever sell them at a discount.”

“That’s not right,” the man insisted.

At this point I was strongly tempted to jump in and offer to buy the cake at full price. I don’t think that in principle there would be anything wrong with doing so.

The thing is, if I’m honest with myself, securing the cake for my girlfriend would not have been my true primary motivation. They sell other things she likes. The guy was being a nit, and I wanted to call him out on it, embarrass him.

Chastened, I held my tongue. The employee resolved the whole situation with an offer to get more cakes from the back. “That sounds good. It’s my birthday!” the man declared with childish delight. The woman disappeared for a moment and returned with a whole tray of cakes. “How much for the whole tray?” the man joked. He was starting to grow on me.

Meanwhile a second employee came over to ask what I wanted. “One to of those, too, actually,” I told her, pointing to the tray of cakes.

“You’re going to buy a whole tray too?” the man asked me jovially.

“They are so good!” his wife chimed in with an endearing, grandmotherly smile.

“Yes, but I think my girlfriend would kill me I brought home a whole tray.” She laughed earnestly. These were turning out to be very nice people, maybe on a fixed income but eager to celebrate a birthday. I was glad I hadn’t been rude to them.

On my way to the cash register, I dropped my cake. It was inside of a plastic container, so it wasn’t ruined- the icing just got a little smashed against the lid of the container. They probably would have given me a different one if I’d asked, but that didn’t seem like an option. It would taste the same in the end anyway.

The police recovered Emily’s bike. The thieves had actually stolen our landlord’s entire bike rack (it wasn’t bolted down) with two bikes still locked to it, but for unknown reasons perhaps owing to the logistical difficulties of transporting a large steel bike rack with two attached bikes had discarded in the bushes of a neighbor’s property barely a block away.

Loose-aggressive play has become so common among the best players that many of them tend to assume that anyone who doesn’t open 50% of hands from the CO can’t be all that good. No American in the tournament is going to be bad, since we all had to travel quite a ways to play, but I think that playing the way I did gave the impression that I was merely competent and perhaps uncomfortable in deep-stacked spots. That’s a fine image to have as long as you know how to exploit it by stealing in spots they don’t expect.

As always, please let me know what you think!

Norm was the first to go. I heard him walking behind my seat on the way to the payout station, muttering about “Ace-Queen against Ace-King”, and that was the last I saw of him. We actually lost three more players in the first half hour, one of whom I eliminated with A4s > KQo.

There were more players than I realized still in the tournament with whom I had no experience. To my left was “Scott”, a hometown hero from Chilliwack with an Irish accent and an inexplicably large cheering section, all of whom were wearing matching “It Could Happen” jackets and shouting loudly whenever he won a pot. Scott eliminated one of the other early departures and was pretty obnoxious about it, getting nervous and calling for cards even as an overwhelming favorite and then celebrating vigorously when his hand held up.

He was also a human tellbox. I don’t see a lot of them, but guys like Scott make me glad that I read Caro’s Book of Tells. His bet sizing gave away a lot, and on top of that he liked to sigh and act frustrated with good hands but play with chips and act strong when he planned to fold.

I’d been hearing about this guy throughout the tournament, though this was my first time sitting with him. Apparently he’d been among the chipleaders throughout the tournament thanks to making an abnormally large number of full houses, often against opponents holding lower full houses. When I’d hit the milliion chip mark the previous day, he was the one guy in the room who still made my stack seem large. Everything about him, from his behavior to his bet sizing to the way he handled his chips, suggested a rank amateur on a heater. This was confirmed when I watched him call an UTG raise from a tight player, then raise a continuation bet and call a shove on an A96 flop. Naturally he was behind Ace-King, a mistake that cost him about a third of his stack. He looked pretty despondent after that.

For my own part, things were going well. In addition to the hand where I eliminated a player, I won a small one by calling a small raise from a young player in the HJ with AJo. I checked and called a bet on a Q82 flop, we both checked a J turn, and then I checked and called a K river. He announced Ace-high and I showed, but in retrospect I think it would have been good to see what he’d raised me with, since I didn’t have much of a feel for how he played.

The next time I tangled post-flop, a guy named Adam who I’d played with previously and knew to be good opened for a small raise from MP. The same kid from last hand called in the CO, and I took a flop with 96s.

It came Kh 9d 6d. Bink. I checked, Adam 40K, the kid folded, and I made it 100K, wanting to give him room to shove his remaining 400K on me with a straight or flush draw. He did shove, and it turned out he had both a straight and a flush draw with 8d 7d. To make matter worse, another player told me, when I turned my cards over, that he folded a 9 and a 6. That left me drawing pretty slim when the Qd came on the turn, and suddenly I was short stacked.

That hand left me with about 350K at 8K/16K/1500. Twentyish BBs is an awkward stack size for stealing, so while I picked up a pot or two, I was mostly card dead and got ground down to about 290K. I hadn’t yet shoved, not on a steal or a resteal, but I was thinking it was about time to start. Then finally, for the first time all tournament, I picked up a pair of Aces. I shoved. Everyone folded.

This was a mistake. I’m not generally a fan of doing shady stuff with AA that you wouldn’t do with any other hand, but in this case my stack wasn’t so small that a min-raise would be suspicious. In fact I’d made a few with only a slightly larger stack before, whereas I’d never open shoved. Moreover, only two of the four players behind me had any chance of picking up on a sizing tell like that and doing anything about it.

Based on how quickly everyone folded, I doubt I would have gotten any action anyway. No one was even curious how much I’d shoved. However, the shove may have influenced what happened next.

I folded for another orbit, grinding my stack back down to where it had been before the Aces. With five minutes left in the level, this was a critical moment for me. Once I paid my blinds and the stakes jumped to 10K/20K/2K, I stood to lose my ability to resteal. After open raising to 40-50K, my opponents would be hard pressed to fold for just 200K more. There was a lot incentive for me to make a move now.

I posted my big blind. I watched Scott look at his cards. No reaction, but he raised to just 35K, which meant he didn’t have a premium hand. Those were worth 3BBs or so to him. I resolved to shove him with anything decent. The action folded to me. I looked down at KTo and announced “All in.”

Without a count or a second thought, Scott said, “Call” and turned over KQo. It was exactly the sort of hand I expected him to have, and while it wasn’t a bad call, it wasn’t one I expected him to make for half his stack, especially not so quickly. He clapped his hands in excitement when he saw that he had me dominated, and again when his Queen came on the flop. Aside from that he was a good sport, though. He offered no further celebration and shook my hand.

A floorman arrived to escort me to the payout station. As we walked, he said to me with a knowing smile, “Wow, he just snap-called you with that King-Queen, huh?

I just checked the results of the tournament. I don’t think I ever played with Rajdeep Pooni, the eventual winner. Adam took 2nd, and Lee, another of the best players I encountered, finished 3rd. Scott final tabled but busted in 9th. My own 13th place finish was good for $15,000. This was a convenient time for a CAD score, because my Canadian bank account was getting low and transferring money from the US usually costs about 3%, so it was nice to get an infusion of local currency. All in all it was a fun tournament and a nice window into the Canadian poker scene.