Almost...

Today I played WCOOP-30, my first ever shootout style tournament. I ended up winning my first table, but busted three handed in Round 2 of 3 when I could start to taste the final table appearance and potential big score. I did still take home $1,925 for my trouble.

In round one I had a few eventful hands. I bluff caught a river shove with two pair against a busted straight draw on what was a pretty awful board. I'm not certain at all that it was a good call, but I'm glad he had air! I doubled through the very good pro who I would eventually play HU in a 3b pot when I flopped a set against his aces, giving me a very sexy chip lead over the table. Finally, when I reached heads up against "Iftaari" a young HU SNG specialist with a solid list of tourney success to his name, I won a flip with AQ against his 66 to take down the table. I was pretty happy at the time to bink the $1.925k for taking down the table, especially given these events are all freerolls to me and this is my second cash.

Round two was rather disappointing. I actually ran decently and won some flips, making it to three handed play (starting at 10 handed). I then got KK in against AK for my stack and the board ran out JT7Q9. Busto. It was a large kick in the pants simply because over half the chips at the table were in the hands of a completely awful fish, a guy you'd consider a borderline whale at the cash tables. Had my KK held up, I would have been in excellent shape to take down the table, meaning I would reach the final table and take down somewhere between $7k for 10th and $91.25k for 1st! Unfortunately it was not to be, and while the beat hurts I definitely feel like I ran very well overall during the event.

I played a thousand hands of cash during the early stages of the tourney, booking a modest $250 win. The tables weren't great though so I shut down the cash session fairly quickly and decided to relax instead while one tabling the tourney. An eventful day and a profitable day, but tough to feel good about, which is one of many reasons why tourney poker is the suck! Five more WCOOP events to go. Even if I don't cash again, I won't be too upset with extracting a little over $4k cash out of my WCOOP ME ticket.

Oh, I should also mention Episode 2 of my Cardrunners video series, "Full Ring Theory and Practice" has been officially dated and will be released on Tuesday, September 21st. Episode 2 focuses mainly on abstract postflop theory and how to apply it in the heat of battle.