This was a $200 Stud/8. I got off to a great start and scooped like three reasonably sized pots in the first level. Unfortunately, the first level of a limit tournament is pretty irrelevent. After that I was getting run down incessantly by a reasonably good NLHE tournament player who evidently had no clue how to play Stud/8. To some extent that’s understandable, but there’s also a degree to which core poker concepts ought to carry over, and if they aren’t, I have to question just how well you even understand NLHE.
Unfortunately for some reason my HH from this tournament wasn’t recorded, but great example of this came when I opened first to act with an A in the door. This player called the raise with split K’s and then called me down all the way. As it happened, I had just a low and he got half the pot. Even players who don’t play split pot games usually know that you aren’t supposed to play for half the pot, but that’s not my point here.
I feel like anyone who genuinely understands reverse implied odds in NLHE (which I guess a tournament specialist might not) should intuitively recognize how bad this is. His hand is essentially face up at every decision point, and even if I don’t have him crushed already, he knows I’ve got at least three outs to beat him for the high pot plus I’m freerolling for the low.
Anyway in addition to that hand he was doing stuff like calling raises with AQ5 and ending up with a better low and a better pair than mine, etc. I did manage to scoop him once with a five-card baby straight when he actually had a legitimate hand (AA4 or something), but it was small consolation.
The hand that really crippled me came about two hours in. I raised with buried Q’s and a 6 in the door, which is a great deceptive hand because it looks I’m playing low. I got called by the 8h. He caught a big heart on 4th and I caught a third Q, so I check-raised him and managed to get four bets in. On 5th he caught another heart, which I figured was bad news, but at that point he only had like 3 BB left so we put them in. It turns out he actually had a pair, a three-flush, and a three to a low when he 3-bet me on 4th (which is an alright play, because it doesn’t really look like the Q helped me) but he rivered a flush to scoop me for most of my stack.
Today I played the $500 PLO, and I’ll have a report on that tomorrow, but I think I’m going to skip tonight’s $100 rebuy. It’ll probably be one of the better events of the series, but I leave tomorrow for a week-long road trip with the girlfriend, who’s moving back across the country to DC (just in time for me not to have a place to stay for the WSOP!!), and I still have a lot of stuff to get done.