That MTT that I won

I did not have that much time, so I registered for a turbo tournament. Actually, I registered for two turbo tournaments simultaneously :-) One at Pacific, a heads up tournament, and one at Full Tilt. At Full Tilt, turbo means 5 minutes per level, and given the very slow level increase, it is still not that fast. This is where I earned $165 (see last post).

At Pacific however, the blinds increased every 3 minutes. Still, I decided to join since I had cashed in several of these heads up tournaments before. Unfortunately, I don't have a record of my play, since PokerOffice does not work with the new interface that Pacific asked me to try out.

As I wrote right away, I lucked out a couple of times, but I also had some opponents that tried really very poorly timed bluffs (I guess that also falls under the heading of "luck"). I went through five or six opponents during the game. The first match lasted quite a while, the penultimate one was very long, and the last match lasted all of two hands!

I think the match two matches before the end was also quite long. I remember checking whether I had already made the money. Several times, I was on the verge of going out.

The last match started when there were 6 players left. And it in fact lasted so long, that when it was over, there were only 3 players left! That meant that I had to wait for the other two players to finish their match before I could play again. At first I thought this put me at a disadvantage (though it was of course nice to automatically reach 2nd place without playing any hands in the meantime...), but then I realized that the increasing blinds were to my advantage here.

The longer that their match lasted, the less severe my disadvantage would be! I could see that whoever won was going to have about three times as many chips as I had. However, since the blinds were now getting close to something like 1/4 or more of my stack, this meant that the longer their match took, the fewer hands I would have to win afterwards to get back to an even footing.

And in fact, when we were finally heads up, my opponent pushed on the very first hand, and I held TT... He had a shitty hand, I forget what it was, and I won the race. This immediately put me into the lead! And what's more, on the next hand he pushed as well. This time I had K9, and given the huge blinds by now, I was getting good odds to call. I got a K on the turn or the river.

It was a very strange feeling to see those cards, see the money slide to my direction, and know that I won the game; that there were going to be no further hands to play. But very nice too...