Doubtless due to the Easter weekend, turnout was lower than normal and only 9 players this month. (will pay more attention to the calendar next year!)
That doesn’t mean the game was any less exciting than with more players
Alex made a good start by flopping trips and having pocket A’s in the first few hands so took the early lead. After that things were quite steady with a lot of un-raised multi-player pots. My main opportunity was flopping a nut flush draw and four people getting all-in. Jock was ahead with top pair (of 8’s) but Alex and Jon (I think) having straight draws. Jon hit the str8 to take a good pot.
After the break there was more action as the blinds started to put pressure on the short stacks. Jock was the bubble boy when he got all-in with Andy with the same chips stack, so we knew one of them was likely to be first out !
My memory is a bit vague (as normal) but remember being fairly low chipped until I saw A-To and raised. Alex who was probably chip lead at the time called my raise. When he checked the 8xx flop (2 diamonds) I went all-in and he called with Ad-9d leaving me holding my breath and not wanting to see any more diamonds. Luckily my A-T held up and I doubled up giving me a fair number of chips.
As the blinds increased the play got more interesting and I was able to maintain around average stack as the number of players decreased. Another key hand came after I had taken a good stack of chips and Bill had just busted Darren out in 4th place. I was on SB with Jon short stacked on the BB with blinds at 800/100 by now. As Bill folded, I decided to steal Jon’s blind with my 8-7o and raised to 4000. Jon thought for a while then shoved all-in, but I was getting over 3:1 so had committed myself to put him all-in if he called anyway. Jon showed A-A (80% chance to win) however the 7-7-4 flop destroyed his chances and I took Jon out on a lucky flop
I had a good lead over Bill and managed to whittle him down but then he staged a come back and doubled up a couple of times to take the chip lead. I was soon down to 10’000 chips to Bill’s 40’000 (blinds up to 1200 by now) so had to start shoving. Incredibly, Bill kept folding and I soon got my stack up again. Bill then fought back and it was very to and fro. In the end I had slightly more chips than Bill and shoved all-in with K-6 Bill called with K-4 and it looked all over…. until a 4 came on the flop… but in a cruel twist of fate my 6 came on the turn and I had won the tournament !!
The heads up in particular was very exciting for me, but the whole game had a very interesting dynamic and everyone was up for a good gamble, so was another great game.
Looking forward to next month already !
