LAUNDRY DAY

I didn't figure to play much poker today. On Mondays, I am overwhelmed with chores around the house. Usually, I am doing laundry while playing a tournament or two, but today I took it easy and caught up on some other stuff while the laundry churned. By the time I sat down to play, I had about an hour before I needed to pick up the kids from school, so I thought I could play a STT. I found a $150 qualifier for a ticket to a $1000 event at Full Tilt. The table was nearly full, so it figured to begin soon, which it did, with me in seat four.

I tried to wait a couple of rounds to allow some short stacks to emerge before I got active, but I got involved in a couple of draws that got me curious without payoff, and I became a short stack myself. The table began with nine, and then there were seven with me on the extreme short stack. I used to just push in whenever I was short, knowing that I had to get lucky. But lately, I have been working on my short-stack tenacity. I survived for awhile by both getting cards at the right time and by picking spots to push in.

Yada yada yada, I'm the chip leader with four remaining. First place is the big ticket, second place is $290, a small but unsatisfying profit. It got heads up and we were roughly even in chips with me holding a slight lead. I trust my heads up game, but he picked up some cards when I was in aggressive mode and I had to back down a couple of times. It was a good battle and the blinds were such that we could have bandied the chip lead back and forth for awhile.

He got a decent chip lead and was trying to use it to bully me out preflop. When I picked up AT, I raised 3x and hoped he had a hand he wanted to play back at me with, which he did with A4. He put it all in, as an ace is a fairly big hand preflop, but I insta-called with my bigger ace. The phone rang, but I stuck around to see the flop, which came 985. I went to grab the cordless, looking forward to coming back to a monster stack and a 90% chance of closing the deal. When I returned, phone in hand, I couldn't believe that I was seeing the "congratulatory" message for finishing second. I had to go into the archives to see it. Did he hit the 4 on the turn or the river? Neither, he caught 32 to make a wheel. Oh boy.