I was playing a $10 +1 Sit & Go with 45 players at Full Tilt and after much turmoil of ups and downs I made it to the final table. I limp in on the button with AK suited, the small blind folds and the big blind re-raises all-in. Since the start of the tournament I’d written some notes down about this player for his overaggressive betting on the big blind and I figured he was trying to steal the blinds. Not to mention he was the big stack at the table so I knew he could easily re-raise with a marginal hand. I put him on an Ace with a weak kicker. I make the call and put all my chips in the middle and that’s when he showed me the one thing I did not want to see the bullets. In case you don’t know A-A is almost a 90% favorite to win against the A-K. I needed running Kings or I was out in 9th place. Flop comes Q-J-K all different suits. Well at least now I added another out, a 10 for a straight and a split pot. Turn comes, 7 of hearts. For that small fraction of a second it takes the computer to lay down the river I’d lost all hope and I diverted my eyes from the screen. When I turn back I see my chip stack doubled. I check the hand history and to my astonishement and my opponent’s frustration as demonstrated by the innapropriate language in the chatbox I’d caught the miracle King on the river. To finish off the story, I went out to win the tournament with my pocket Queens holding up against my opponent’s pocket Eights and I racked $171.

What I learned from this tournament is that I have the perseverance and the patience to win a large multi-player tournament. I have the skills to make it to the final table, and I have the courage to put all my chips in the middle (granted it was a stroke of luck that I won that pot going in as the underdog, but regardless). The other thing that I realized and this is what really made me think. I just played a tournament for a little over 2 hours and after outplaying 44 other players all I have to show for it is a mere $171. Of course some might say that’s about $80/hour which is phenomenal but I can’t exactly repeat the process every day.

So here’s what I’ve come up with. Registration for the World Series of Poker 2008 begin at the end of March. By that time I need to have accumulated $10,000 to be able secure a seat in the main event and try to battle it out with the best of them. $10,000 in a month and a half sounds highly improbable I know, but my A-K vs A-A seemed unprobable as well and look how that worked out for me.

The details: I have $75 right now in my Full Tilt Poker account, my goal is to exponentially grow my tournament winnings until I have accumulated enough to buy in to larger tournaments with larger cash prizes.

I’ll be updating my status as I go along, and to give a little something back to the poker community I’ll be posting some tips that might help some of you aspiring poker players.

Happy Valentine’s day everyone, I’ve got to get ready to meet the lady because it’s bad enough I’m playing poker so much if she finds out that I’m running late because I’m writing about poker well she’ll have my head


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