The Steinhorn Stare

As I mentioned in a recent post, after a many month hiatus from poker (new job, new girlfriend, etc), I’ve started playing again just a bit, and today I played my first tournament since August. It was the Shooting Star $2000 No-Limit Hold’em Event at Bay 101, and play started this morning with 250 players.

Long story short, I played well, and finished a respectable (though disappointing) 62nd place.

Not many terribly interesting hands, though after the second round, I got moved to a table with two “shooting stars” (Phil Hellmuth and Eli Elezra). The shooting stars are well-known pros placed one-per-table to make the tournament more interesting. In previous years, knocking a shooting star out of the tournament would have earned you $1000 in “bounty,” though this year there were no bounties, so kn0cking out the stars only gets you bragging rights. Too bad, as I knocked both of them out within about 30 minutes; oh well, there goes what would have been an easy $2000…

Unfortunately, I can’t take much credit for the knock-outs, as both players were short-stacked when I got to the table. The hand against Phil was pretty straight-forward; with blinds at $100/200, a middle position player comes in for a raise to $700, Phil pushes all-in on the button for a total of $3500, and I look down at AKo in the small blind. Assuming Phil is going to reraise in this spot with pretty much any pair or any ace down to AT, the call is relatively easy. I actually push all-in to isolate, and knock out the original raiser, which I do. Phil turns over ATo, and my AK holds up. And the hand against Eli is even less interesting, so I won’t go into details.

At one point I was able to run my chips up to about $40K when my JJ flopped a set and held up against an open-ended straight-flush draw. After that, I started picking up a lot of above-average hands (big pairs, big suited connectors) that w0uld get multiple callers and then completely miss the flop. After hovering between $25-35K for about 6 hours, I made an all-in reraise for my last $25K (blinds at $500/1000/100) with JJ, got called and found myself against QQ, and out of the tournament.

The only other interesting story from the day is that I had a last longer bet (a bet on who will survive in the tournament longer) with a good friend of mine who was also playing; after playing for nearly 7 hours, we both got knocked out within 45 seconds of one another, though unfortunately for me, I was first and lost that bet too…

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.