[Ungoliant]

Virtually everyone that's played against him agrees that he's one of the best players in the world and I seriously doubt he forgot how to play or was any more affected by the pressure than anyone else there. How many hands did he play, like 200? That's a ridiculously small sample size and I think it's obvious he just wasn't catching cards in the right situations. While Gold was busting people with QQ vs. JJ, AC either wasn't getting those kind of hands at all, or was just unlucky that no one else had a good hand at the same time and he just won the blinds. There are almost infinite ways luck can affect the result and it's pretty clear that Allen just wasn't catching any breaks.

As for getting pushed around by Gold, I think part of it was just not getting the cards to play back at him, and part of it was just good strategy. Allen knew he was the best player there and there were a lot of amateurs with a lot of chips. There's no sense in playing big pots with marginal hands against the one guy that can bust you when you can just sit back and wait for some donk to push JJ preflop against you or get too attached to top pair when you flop a set. I think Allen got involved in the table talk becuase he's good enough to use it to get a read on Gold, not because he was getting "sucked into it".

Basically, yes, I think it's too small a sample to draw any real conclusions. Anyone who knows anything about tournaments would have said before the final table that Gold was the favorite and Allen was a significant underdog just based on chip counts.