Winner!

Well, I navigated the minefield that is a $125 buy in tournament at the Grand Sierra Pot of Gold. 296 entries. First place. I was playing very well. Didn't have that many big hands, but did a lot of chipping up with well-timed raises and staying out of troubling spots. What I found in this tourney was that hand reading and people reading seemed very easy. Part of this is certainly due to the poor quality of the field. Its a lot easier to read players in a $125 MTT versus one where the buy in is $5K or so.

One key hand was the first hand of the final table. I came in as the chip leader I think, and we were 10 handed for the first time. To my left was Scott Gould, a hyper-aggressive player who I've played with before, and fortunately had the opportunity to play with for several hours at this event. Scott raises just about every pot he plays, an effective style that created a big stack. It also puts him at risk of getting trapped so this was the plan. I also thought that Scott was the most dangerous player at the final table, so when he smooth-called my standard raise I was a bit worried. I held KQ off-suit and the flop came K-8-7 with two spades. I made a continuation bet of about 2/3 of the pot and Scott pushes all in. Its a substantial bet, and I'm really not sure if he was trying to make me go away or he was betting for value. If it was the first cause, he miscalculated as my chip stack was large enough to be able to lose the hand and still be at the average. If he had a set its a strange bet. More likely he has a spade draw. I called him and he flipped over pocket nines, drawing to two cards. He missed and I had a very nice chip lead.

We then lost several more players and got down to 5. I made a couple attempts to knock out short stacks and also found situations where I would raise pre-flop, face an all-in from a short stack, and then have to call based on obvious pot odds, despite knowing that my AT or the like was a dog. This went on for awhile and about 2:30 am I asked for a chip count. I had 165K which was 2% better than the second place player. The prize pool was the following:

1st $10,652 + $2600 entry into the main event on Saturday
2nd $ 5859
3rd $ 2996
4th $ 2330
5th $ 1997

Using their chip count calculator, they had me getting about $5800 and second place getting $5100 or so. Everyone else got over $3000. The main event seat had real value to me as I was planning on buying in anyway. It also took the tourney director about 20 minutes to figure this out and they wouldn't stop the clock. They also would not let us do a chop and then play on for the entry or the trophy. This was also strange because they had done so in past tourneys. Finally, it seems that the GSR was implenting new IRS rules about tourney wins greater than $5000 having withholding and reporting. That made it simple for me. I offered to take $4999 in cash plus the entry. The second chip stack would take the $700 or so I was giving up, and everyone else got what was calculated. One guy objected, trying to milk out another couple hundred bucks. Whatever. I paid him a bit just to get the deal done and that was that. Its a nice trophy and I hope to add to it by taking down the bigger tourney this weekend.