Thanks to the great work of Jen and snoopy, most of you know that I recently final tabled the $5k Short-Handed WSOP event. As i stated in a previous entry, this was beyond my wildest dreams when I embarked on my vegas adventure.
Before this tournament began it was the one I was most looking forward to playing and thought it was my best chance of a cashing since I play a high volume of 6 handed cash games and feel I am quite adept at short-handed play. When play started i wasnt too pleased with my starting table as I recognised 3 of the players. Ben Roberts, Robert Willamson III and John Espisito. The first two hours were pretty uneventful for me apart from laying down an overpair to a flopped set (I was shown).
After 3 hours I had 6k and got moved to a different table. Carrying my meagre amount of chips, I wandered through the tables looking for my seat. I find it, only to be greeted my the intimidating figure of Howard Lederer directly on my left. Another recognisable face at the table was well known high stakes online cash player Hallingoll. One other player was clearly the value at the table and thats where I started to build my stack from, constantly taking him off pots, preflop and postflop as soon as I sensed weakness. Howard Lederer had the unfortunate K-K vs A-A situation and that was a problem removed my left.
I picked up no really big hands but was steadily building chips by taking pots away from the weaker players. We had reached the last 100 or so and I had now entered the time when cashing was a realistic possibility. Joe beevers got moved to my left, and my prior knowledge of his game told me that he wouldnt be tricky, just straightforward playing good hands. We finally got down to the bubble and it wasn't really a big deal for me, since i was essentially freerolling this event because of my 2nd Aruba package win that i sold for $6k. The extra $3k for making the money would have been nice, but pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. I was short stacked at this point with about 11 big blinds and pushed all in a few times with marginal holdings and took it down uncontested each time to make my stack a little more healty after the bubble had burst.
I had no flexibilty in my play becuse of my stack size so had to wait for decent cards or opportunites. At the end of the day, our table broke and I was relocated with my dismal stack of $23k and told to bag it up. It wasnt until i got back to the hotel and looked on cardplayer that I realised we were down to 36 players and had achieved the next pay bracket, $11,300. I was going to be coming back the next day with an M of around 6 and one of the bottom few stacks, so I would be gambling early...
