TY, and I didn't mind the label, its true of any tournament winner.

Yeah I did end up not agreeing with those arguments as well (and so shoving), and I probably should have placed more emphasis on point 4 .

The game-plan was different against the short-stacks - that's how I got caught with K5. I didn't go to showdown much but people were helping my image with "which pair was it this time?" when I shoved T6s into someone with 8bbs... (I opening 84s for a minraise against BB in seat 6 (I think) and regretted raising when he looked interested with 10bbs and I hadn't noticed he was that short, but he called the raise and check-folded flop that's the best sort of running good IMO)

It is only like 0.8% of the time that India's hand gives me a problem, but since so many live players give it away (if they've looked at their cards) I thought it was worth taking a moment to look at. Avoiding 0.5% of tourney exists when you hold 10% of the chips is probably pretty profitable - especially when passing isn't terrible.

Obv India made stealing a little tougher in theory, but from my cash background, aggressive COvBUvSBvsBB with deeper stacks is probably what I'm best at. It was lucky that she was moved though, because it gave me 2 or 3 easier open shoves each round against the other 3 - hence the K5.

I would have never taken an otherwise unnecessary close gamble to eliminate a player in that spot - I thought that its an ICM nightmare with a lot of chips close to the FT, and no-one seemed to be playing close to perfectly enough to justify it. Also, if their were better players there, I thought that I wanted to try to avoid them at that stage to pick up chips in easier spots, because I'd figure to do better against them if we made the final 4/5 than in any hand with 7-9 players dealt in (Obv, I'd prefer to close against bad players, but there's no chance I'm not favourite against any final 4, but I may make big mistakes at full ring, so I feel like that plan had a bigger £ev) . 

Overall though, my tournament experience is probably in the low double figures so I'm definitely still learning and welcome the discussion/criticism/feedback. In past tournaments I think I'd made too many cash-style "easy shoves" (esp because full ring live players just don't open/3B/4B anything like online 6max), and I probably tend to keep variance high, so at the moment I'm putting a lot of thought into tournament spots where it could be the wrong decision.

So that's why I thought for a while that it could have been a pass, but then decided the reasons were bad, and shoved anyway...

[instantly]

Guy makes a move and 3 bets all in ... Alex Bowler dwells and dwells and eventually makes the call with AK

Guy has 9 10 off

flop 8 10 2 5 J


Guy up to 200k !!

Karma for slowrolling.

I have to make this the first hand I write about now, in my defense! I put it in my blog but I know some forums don't like having links to follow, so here's what happened:

"With a couple of tables left I had about 280,000 which was pretty much an average stack for the final table, and late-mid-position player shoves for about 120,000, I think the blinds were 4k/8k or maybe even 3/6, because it was a bigger-than-usual shove. Here’s why I didn’t instantly reraise from the small blind:
1) The big blind had me covered and I considered whether she had seen her cards and whether she looked interested. It seemed like it would be a really bad mistake to lose all 35 blinds when I was aiming to put 15 at risk just to win the small profit from a majority of the equity in a 30bb pot (say 5bb profit?)
2) The 3 stacks after the BB were short enough to be easy to play against, meaning we could pick up a lot of antes with little risk. It was correct for them to stay pretty tight because of pay bubbles and other short stacks – this meant that as long as I had a big enough stack to stay liberal with the open-raises it might have been as profitable to fold the AK there as to call, and that’s obviously lower risk.
3) The player shoving almost certainly had a range that was ‘too weak’ to be ideal – given he plays big hands differently. I’d have preferred to think he had at least an ace so that I could be closer to 7/3 than 6/4. Note that at 6/4 I only earn (32*0.6-15) 4.2 big blinds on the call – about the same as 2 successful ante-steals. (I remember watching Helmuth complain about this situation against Varkoni in the old WSOP shows.)
4) After day one finished around midnight we went in to the city and drank a lot and got back early that morning! It was taking me much longer than usual to think through anything. Not a poker reason I know, but it was a genuine reason!
Of course, in the end I decided that the possible arguments for passing (or call-folding!) weren’t good enough and made the call. I know that a lot of live tournament players slow-roll a lot of clear decisions either because they either enjoy dwelling in their decision moment, or they maybe think that giving up on a pot without taking ages looks weak, or they saw pros on TV take a long time, or whatever, so I thought I’d write up what was happening this hand, sort of to regain credibility by showing that there was a decision (IMO at the time), but also so that other players maybe don’t mark me as a rude-tourney-donk-slowroller and so then I can keep a place on the soap-box of complaining about those who are!"

Re:Julian I think it was, I am Alex B on THMF...