APAT Season 2 - Regional leg 3

I was really hoping for a good finish in this event as I wanted to qualify for the National event to be held in Cardiff next month. I played in that one last year and finished 17th, so was keen to play it again. It was quite ironic that I did so well last month and qualified for the Manchester event, knowing full well that I wouldn't be able to make it anyway.

This time, we only had 56 starters, so it was only top 6 qualify for Cardiff. I was sat on the same table as my friend John who I met at the last event. (We both reached the final table then, and he stayed to cheer me on after he got knocked out). Unfortunately he misplayed his AJ against me when I was holding KK. I went all-in and he still called despite realising then that he was beat. Early exit for him, good start for me.

With blinds at 200/400, the following hand came up. It was folded to me in middle position. I raised to 1200 with A8. The short stack on my immediate left put in his final 1100, and the Big Blind pushed his stack. I had to call 2700 in a pot of about 6800. This gave me odds of 2½:1 which was nice, but I wasn't sure how far I was behind. I made the "reluctant" call. Shortie showed QT, the big blind showed AJ. I hit my 8 on the turn to knocked both players out. The big blind was not happy! This took my stack up to 13,800 (we started with 3000). I posted this hand on the BlondePoker forum, and got a mixed bag of answers, so I'm still not sure if it was the correct call or not.

My stack took a hit shortly afterwards when I pushed KQ on a K high board. Unfortunately, my opponent had AA and I was back down to around 9k. After that, I couldn't get anything going. The table tightened up and all I could get was blinds to maintain my stack at a constant level. The blinds were catching up with me and I needed a double-up, but I couldn't get the cards to make a move with.

With blinds at 400/800, I was in the small blind with about 6500 left (after posting the blind). A short stack had raised about 3600 leaving only 800 behind (strange move!). I looked down at AT, the best hand I'd seen for a while. I didn't like it, but figured it was my best chance. I pushed the remainder of my stack. Unfortunately, the big blind also pushed, and I knew I was in trouble. He showed AQ, and the shortie had only QT. I couldn't catch one of the 2 remaining Tens in the pack, and was out around 23rd.

This was definitely a strange tournament in that on each blind level, I kept expecting lots of players to get knocked out, but it never happened. Certainly on my table, everyone had roughly the same stack sizes (~10-15k) and there was no dominating chip leader. It very quickly became a crapshoot without the knockouts.

I had another stab at trying to qualify for Cardiff last night by playing online at BlueSq. Unfortunately I was card dead for most of the tournament. The best hand I had was 99, and even then I had to cold-call a pre-flop reraise hoping to flop a set. My final attempt will be to buy-in directly tonight if I can beat the rush. These tournaments do get oversubscribed very quickly.