My Confession

[Cornell Fiji]

It was my first WPT event. The WPT Niagra 10k main event. We had 20,000 chips and after donking off 5,000 to Gavin Smith I got lucky and was able to double up when I turned the nuts against my opponent's turned top two pair.

I ran the 30,000 into 50,000 before I got moved to a new table with Captain Tom on my left. Tom was the table chipleader and I raised a couple hands preflop only to have him smooth call and take the hands away from me on later streets.

I didn't know who Captain Tom was at the time but I did hear him bragging about his WSOP bracelet to some kid with effeminate speech tones (the kid didn't look a day over 19) who told him that even though the Captain was an old school live player that the kid was better and more experienced than him because of all of the hands that he saw online. Well, that seemed to piss the Captain off and he seemingly decided to not let anyone under 25 win a single pot at the table. I raised a couple pocket pairs and AK over the next hour but I missed every flop and Captain Tom floated my c-bets and bet when I checked and before I knew it my stack was back down to the original 20,000.

Thankfully, my table broke after the dinner break and I got moved to a much friendlier location in the back of the room.

The players at my table were fairly solid and between their good play and my 20,000 chip stack I did not have much room to maneuver.

David Singer was nursing a short stack and a couple young kids were making moves. There was also an Asian guy at the table who defied all stereotypes by not playing a hand for two hours... Actually, thats an exaggeration, the Asian guy once raised preflop with kings and got his money in on an all undercard flop to double up.

I stole the blinds a couple times and lost a couple small pots to leave my stack at 17,500 in the 300/600/100 level when the following hand came up.

The Asian man with the Buddhist disposition (15,000 chips) raised under the gun to 2,000. It folded to me in the cut off and I had A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]K[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]. I looked around the room and saw a pale faced guy in a green Red Sox hat on the rail. Action Dan and I made eye contact and he gave me a little nod.

I was playing for first place in this tournament and I was willing to push every single cEV edge that I could find so I thought for about 15 more seconds before I sighed and tossed my cards into the muck.