I won another WSOP seat tonight in a $650 satellite. Man, these things are soft. I mean, there are some good players, but you don’t even have to get first. Plus you get half hour levels, so nice deep stacks to outplay the donks. Three and a half hours into the tournament, I had 120 BB’s, which is unheard of for an online poker tournament. I took a brutal beat when I was 2nd out of 16 with 6 seats to pay.
I got 1/3 of my stack in with KK versus 88, and the guy caught. That knocked me down to the point where I had to scrap for my seat, whereas winning that would have pretty much locked it up for me. I stole and restole really effectively, though, and despite winning an important coin flip at the final table, I managed to coast in thanks to some very bad bubble play by others. And in an act of karmic justice, the 88 guy bubbled (in 8th place, no less) when his AKs lost all in preflop to AQo.
I was going to post some hands, but I just scoured the HH and really didn’t find anything of much interest. It was mostly straightforward stuff, the structure is good enough that you can wait around for good opportunities early on. The bubble play was kind of interesting, but not in terms of isolated hands. I literally think that my cards mattered in like 2% of the decisions I made during the last 25% of the tournament. I was just open raising or re-stealing very situationally, and other times open folding TT in the SB or A9 on the button. I don’t claim to play these spots perfectly, but just recognizing them is so much more than even many otherwise solid players can do.
As of the last seat I won, I’ve now spent $15,387 on WSOP sats to win a $12,000 prize package plus $2000 cash and W$20,000. In two weeks, I went from basically break-even on these to a greater than 100% return on my money. That’s tournament poker.