PhantomMut

Waiting for round two of a Heads-Up tourney right now, my first round having lasted 3 hands. But how the first ended was kind of amusing:

Lately I've been playing more tournaments, for three primary reasons:

• My luck has been terrible.
• My ring game skills have gone to hell in a hand basket. (I have yet to shake habit of letting bad luck turn me into The Incredible Dulk (like the Hulk, only more like a Donkey.)
• My bankroll has been bleeding like an extra in a Roger Corman film.

Tournaments have the following characteristics that help me in my time of distress:

• After the first couple of hands, a large percentage of the "wheee!!!" all- in- or- bust- oh- wait- that- should- be- an- "and"- eventually- shouldn't- it? crowd is bitching to themselves about not catching their three-outer, and not ramping up the variance for everyone else.
• Tournaments reward a focus on playing the cards and not the ROI of the cards. Which makes it easier to lay down good hands that are probably winners and focus on looking for hands that are truly solid.
• Tourneys have a built-in stop-loss; you don't make the money, you've lost your buy-in. Period.

And I have been doing very well in tourneys the last few days. In that time I've:

• Finished 22nd in a 12,000 person NLHE Hubble's Hold'em freeroll tourney, earning a ticket to a tourney with a $2,000 prize pool.
• Finished in the top 200 in a 2900 player tourney (play was suspended at that point) to win a ticket to a second qualifier which in itself was a qualifier to a tourney with the prize of a seat at the National Heads-Up Championship.
• Finished 59th (9 away from winning a ticket, dammit) out of 2369 runners in that qualifier.

(Thank you, les4316 and Clemens22, for following the tournament. You both probably brought me luck.)

It's been an active few days, so I didn't take my shot at the Weekly Round 2 today; I'll wait until next weekend to see if I can turn that ticket into real cash. If I play as well then as I have been lately, that's not an unreasonable hope.

Anyway, there'll be a post tomorrow about the bone-headed play that cost me a chance at playing in the National Heads-Up Championship, but I want to publish the last hand I played, and discuss my logic.