Adam Winter

After two nights of drinking lot with friends and having a good time, I needed to get my grind on. Sunday I loaded up a few tournaments starting around 3:30pm. I final tabled a random $8.80 10-minute levels tourney on stars and finished a respectable 6th out of 2800+ for $735. I also won some smaller prizes and netted +$810 on the day. The tournament hand history I might turn into a free video for Smart Poker Training. There really wasn’t anything too special about it – although I think I made a few great laydowns, and some hands are worth discussing. I did give one guy a pretty bad beat late in the tourney when my AJ beat his AK all in preflop. I only had 11.5 bb’s and shoved over his late position open raise. About 20 hands before this, I lost QQ to AK for a 1.5 million chip pot that would have put me as the chip leader with only 15 players left. If I had won that hand, I think my chances of finishing top 3 would have been about 75%+.

My final hand I had 10-10 in the small blind and two players limped in 6 handed. I had 400k chips and the blinds were 20k/40k so I had to shove. The only thing that made me suspicious was that the player who limped in first was playing 7% of his hands and raising them, so I was immediately suspecting a big hand, and sure enough he had KK. I still think shoving is correct though in my position because of the extra chips in the pot, my hand strength, and position (I was in 6th by a wide margin). The opponent could have been doing this with Ax suited, QJ/J10, 33-99 as well. It was a good feeling making a final table after barely playing mtt’s the past few months. Once I get back in the groove of things, I expect to have some nice scores.

-Adam