Ace Ten turns Tournament Around

Last night I played a large multi-table online poker tournament. There were 677 players and I was hyper-focused and tuned into what I had to do. Sure, I play poker almost each and every night but there are some nights online where you can get distracted by the everyday things that happen in family life. There were no such distractions this time and I knew that things were going to work out early on.

After the first hour or so I was still languishing around the tournament average when I finally hit a set of fours and easily doubled up with a flush draw on the board. Those are always ideal situations because your opponent doesn't want you drawing out on them and will usually assume that you are on a flush draw when they have top pair. In any event this particular play took me up to $13+ in chips and almost double the tournament average at the time.

After another hour or so I had stolen a few blinds here and there but otherwise was playing rather uneventful poker with little action. Another half hour passed and the average stack had caught up to me at $13k. Then a crucial play came up that would catapult me into the stratosphere.

The action folded around to me while I was holding [Ad][Td] in the cutoff and raised it up to $1500. The small blind folded and the button pushed all-in for $5k. Normally this would have been an easy fold but the blinds were $500 / $250 giving me better than 2 to 1 to call the raise. I took my time and went back over how this guy had played throughout the entire hour at the table with him. After a minute or so I decided to call for two reasons.

1. If he had a big hand why would he want to take a chance of pushing me out of the pot with a big raise? Wouldn't he simply flat call and then push?

2. He was short stacked and was making a move knowing that I would take a significant hit to my stack if I called and was wrong.

Armed with that information I made the call and he turned over [Qs][8c]. To add even more humor to the hand he called me the donkey. Needless to say I found that quite amusing as I had made a particularly good call in that spot. In any event I flopped an Ace and the rest was history. I went on to take down 16th place and a decent cash. The moral of the story is that we don't always have to have that big premium hand in order to take down a game changing pot. We just need to have the BEST hand and follow our instincts to act on that hand. From that point on I went on a tear and finished 16th out of 677. Short of the goal but certainly a run to be proud of.