MAIN EVENT

With $10,000 to start with and $25/50 blinds for the first two hours, my focus was on staying out of trouble. With such a structure, there is no reason to mix it up and risk getting short-stacked. I was willing to preserve capital and wait for good cards. I could wait six hours before I would feel the need to mix it up a bit, and sometime during that stretch good cards were certain to come. With each fold, I observed the players who contested the pot and tried to categorize their styles of play. One guy was extremely aggressive, contesting several pots and slowly building up his chip stack.

My first play was to raise to $150 with pocket nines. The action folded around and I was ever briefly above $10,000. Not long after, it was folded around to me in middle position and I raised with pocket deuces. The player acting after me re-raised it up plenty so I folded. I went back into fold mode until looking down at my hand on the big blind and finding wired aces. I was both excited and hesitant. I knew that the odds were with me to either win a small pot or lose a large one. There were three callers of the $50 blind, so I bumped it up to $300. There was one caller and it was the aggressive player. He had not been the first one in the pot, but rather the second, so it figured he had some kind of calling hand like a small to middle pair or a couple of moderately high suited cards.

The pot was $775 and the flop came 776. I bet out $500 to end the hand and claim my prize. To my surprise, he called. Yikes, there was no flush draw on the board, so either he hit a seven, or he picked up some sort of straight draw with perhaps 98, or he holds a pocket pair in the vicinity of four, five, or eight, maybe sixes. The pot was $1775 and proper strategy suggests it was time for me to put on the brakes and not pump the pot any higher. The turn brought a 3 which got me worried about giving him a free card should he hold fours or fives. I didn't want him drawing an inside straight on me for free, so I pushed $1000 into the pot. If he raised me, I would make the laydown to avoid getting broke against trips. He smooth called again which pretty much told me everything I needed to know - he had a seven. I was surprised that he didn't raise me right there, since I'm sure he put me on an overpair at this point and he would have been concerned to see a face card hit the board. I still couldn't get my mind around the fact that he might have called my preflop raise with some unpaired hand which contained a seven. I began to think either he's got a pair of sixes and flopped a boat or he's got an overpair and thinks they might be good against AK. The pot was $3775 and was shaping into a monster - just the kind of hand I was hoping to avoid, but one I wouldn't mind raking. No limit hold 'em tournaments are about avoiding trips and I sensed I was being reeled into a big one.

Then came the blasted river 7 making the board 77637. Now my main concern - that he held a seven - seemed so remote. He did play the hand as if he held a seven and was trying to goad me into overplaying my high pair, but he also could have a couple of sixes which just got counterfeited or a high pair of his own that he believes are good. My aces would now stand against any hand that did not contain a seven and I just thought it so implausible that he would have called a $250 raise in the first level of a major tournament with an unpaired hand, much less one that contained a seven. I bet out $2000, thinking my aces were good, and knowing that a raise would suggest he did hold the case seven. If I had not made that bet, I could have gotten away from the hand with my stack at or around $7200 minus whatever he chose to extract from me at the river. But had I not bet and he made a bold all-in move, I wouldn't know where I was at and I may have been stuck laying down the best hand. Since he was an aggressive player and since the odds suggested my aces were good, as you can never give an opponent credit for four of a kind, I decided to lead at the pot. He came back all-in which put the onus back onto me.

At this point I'm sure everyone at the table was expecting me to show aces, but the question was whether I would fold or call. After being so hesitant in calling my first two bets, suggesting trap-setting strength, he boldly went all-in at the river, which suggested weakness as he stared me down. Why bet so much and give me the chance to make a great laydown when a $2000 raise would have stood a near-certain chance of getting paid off? I knew there was a good chance that I was about to bust out, but with half my chips in the pot, the case seven lowering the odds of him holding one, the fact that if he did hold a seven then his hand must be unpaired, the fact that he was an aggressive player who is capable of putting on a move, and the fact that he came back all in rather than simply extracting a sure payoff, I decided that I would risk my tournament life and make him show me the quads. I was visibly disturbed as I made the call, because my gut told me he had a seven even as the odds suggested he did not. If he had flipped over a pair of sixes then I would have been a genius and the table captain as well. Instead, he showed 87 unsuited and raked a monster pot containing all my chips and all my dreams of becoming a millionaire by the end of the week.