Jimmy Fricke

The $325 bounty tournament yesterday ended in success, with me taking it down for $22,500. The field got about 300 players and I ran very very good throughout the whole thing. At 150/300/50 blinds I started with 4k in chips and two hours later I was sitting with 100k in front of me thanks to a few very good situations that came about.

I chip up to around 12k with 0evg0 on my left has the button when the bb is sitting out for this hand, so his 400 is dead with big antes. I pick up QJcc in the CO and decide to limp because of all the chips in the middle, taking away evg's chance to 3bet shove against my open which I fully expect would happen. He limps, which I think he's doing with a wide array of hands, and the sb completes. 3 to the flop of J87 rainbow with no club. Check, I bet 1000 with the intent to 3bet over evg's raise. He raises to 3800 and he started with about 500 chips less than me. Small blind folds and I shove and he snapcalls with a set of sevens, which I honestly thought there was no way he could have because I would expect him to raise preflop with 77, 88 and JJ. If I were behind, I'd expect to be behind 87, T9, J8 and maybe KJ. Fortunately for me, evg runs worse than anyone ever and it comes running eights so the board is J8788 and I counterfeited his set. So I'm up to about 25k and win a few pots to put me at about 35k when the following hand occurs.

The only two aggro players on my left, and it's pretty clear that they want to 3bet me with a very wide range. I pick up 55 utg at 300/600/75 and make it 1700 on a very tight bb. Folds to the guy two to my left who makes it 5800 and it's clear from the way he 3bet me that he barely looked at his cards, almost in passing. Folds to the bb who was very short for a long time and finally has about 30k in chips after going on a huge rush. He looks at his cards and in a cheerful voice says "I call!" This led me to believe he very very likely did not have AA/KK. With so much in the pot, a decent amount of implied odds to what I thought was a mid-high pair against the bb and possibly the reraiser having a hand or flopping something to bet with, I decided to call. The flop comes 543 with two clubs and we check to the guy two to my left who bets 14k. The bb shoves with JJ, I announce "I would like to re-wager" and shove, and unfortunately for the reraiser he flopped a flush draw and had to call off the rest. I turn a 5 and the river's the ace of spades, cause it's always the fucking ace of spades.

So I'm up to the chiplead at about 100k and from then on I just keep chipping up and getting in amazing situations against the shorter stacks. I didn't really get played back at and picked up cards when I needed it. The interesting thing was, once we got to 2 AM we were playing HU and I had a 5:1 chiplead over a regular live player here at TS and the tournament director all of a sudden said "okay, we're done." He was making us quit at 2 AM because it said on the structure sheet that we would have to. We would come back the following day at 4 PM to play the rest out. There was easily less than half an hour of play left, and honestly I would've preferred coming back the next day to play but I decided to be a nice guy and chop with him. Unfortunately I think being up for a long time on not much sleep screwed up my math because I gave him about $1k more than I should've.

But today was uneventful in the 6max, even though I was looking forward to it a lot. I was actually out in the first level when I lost a huge pot when JJ lost to KK on a ten high board against pretty much the only player at the table I would be going broke against, then lost a 2500 chip pot with AQdd v 99. What can ya do?

Tomorrow's a $500, should be fun, hopefully I can get lots of sleep for it though. I'll let you all know how it goes.