The good

As you may have read, I finally took down a large, online MTT Friday night. I won the UB 11PM $5 buy-in, beating 877 other people for a nice payoff of almost $1000 (cha-ching!)

It was a real journey, I'll tell you that. I got up fairly early tripling up before first break. From there I just hung around and slowly accumulated chips. I avoided coinflips and bad beats (very important). Later on, I made sure to be aggressive with good hands and steal when given the opportunity.

The big hand of the night was when we were down to 14 or so. I had around 60000 in chips with blinds at 3000/6000 and a 500 ante. I was dealt AK in the CO. Chip leader was UTG and made a minimum raise, I made it 25000 and he called. Flop brought rags and he checked, so I put him on a smallish pair. I felt it was time to pull the the trigger and moved in, he thought for while and called.

The turn brought a K and all of the sudden I'm near the top of the list. That gave me some ammo the shove around the more timid players and cruise to the final table. Actually, that's when it got a bit easier. Once we got to the final table, it seemed that everybody was picking each other off left and right. Blinds got crazy and people we moving in with suited cards, and A, etc. I caught a couple of winners at the right time and got down to heads up. The other guy was fairly aggressive and we had a good match. With blinds at 15000/30000 and 3000 ante I got 2 3 in the BB. He had been raising with just about anything and I had been a tad more selective. He raised here and I called, just in case.

Well, I got a 3 4 3 flop and I was off to the races. I made a min bet to try and draw him in. He took the bait (and then some) when he bet out 240000. Of course, I moved in to make it look like I was trying to steal and he called with 4 6. He didn't get his miracle and I was jumping around the room like a little boy having to go pee.

It was great to know that I can play this game a little bit. I'd been on a rough run and started to wonder, but now I know I have some talent for this game, anyway.

Of course, I played some more, but that's another post.