5th in the Stars Blogger Championship of Online Poker

I managed to make the final table of the blogger freeroll on PokerStars. TarHeel1641 is my sn on Stars; I didn't have an account there until I decided to play in this tourney, but I'll be playing there at least a little bit more as now I have a Step 3 and a Step 6 ticket as a result of my freeroll finishes. Although it's usually the case that anybody making a final table in a large tourney has to run like god for a while, in this tournament I really didn't. I was all-in before the river 22 times and won 10.5/22 (one spritpot!), while my average equity was 46%, so basically right on the money. Most of my chips came non-showdown style. I think I played pretty decent, but a couple of key mistakes cost me.

The first and most egregious came when we were down to 10 players, with blinds at 5k/10k. I had about 160k in chips in the bb, and the sb had about 100k in chips. It folded around to him and he min raised. I thought he was trying to steal cheap without risking his tourney life while on the final table bubble, and would fold like a girl if I put him to the test. So I shoved K2o and ran into AA. Whoops. Looking back, that was pretty terrible. He had open shoved a few times before, so I think that's what he would have done if he had wanted to steal. Actually the time I got in KJ vs. AA was kind of a similar situation, where the sb was down to about 10 bbs, opened but didn't shove, and snapped off my re-ship. I definitely need to pay more attention to that kind of bet sizing that's trying to induce a shove from me. Anyway, the K2 shove cost me big time as a couple of hands later, down to 5 bbs or so, I woke up with AA and doubled up through an aggressive player who had QQ. If I had 15bbs there instead of 5bbs, I would have certainly doubled up to 30bbs, and had a very formidable stack, not to mention crippling one of the better remaining players.

The second was down to five players. I had 11 bbs or so on the button and the cutoff, with about the same stack size as mine, open shoved. I tanked for a bit and folded KQo. If the players to my left had been weaker I could maybe fold there and rely on picking up a lot of blinds and antes later. But folds from them were somewhat hard to come by, so while I don't really relish calling off my tourney life with KQ-high preflop, I think I beat the range of a cutoff shover pretty handily. He's probably shoving 50% of hands or so, and I've got 56% equity vs. that range, plus the overlay of blinds and antes. There is the small chance too that one of the blinds wakes up with something huge, but...I think that one should be a call. In any case, a few hands later it was folded to me in the sb with A4o, so I obviously shoved in my last 10bbs and was instacalled by AT, which held.

Congrats to all the other bloggers that came away from the event with a prize, and thanks to Poker Stars for hosting the event and throwing in some nice prizes. I'll be hunting for a nice place to spend my Step 6 ticket....

-BRUECHIPS