On Bodog last night I entered a $5 + .50 cent (to the house) NL hold-em tourney w a guarenteed $1500 prize pool. With about 260 entrants I played mighty conservative the first hour (generally only playing JJ or better and A/paint suited), which surprisingly helped me build a healthy stack of chips. yada yada yada we’re at the final table, I’ve got a slight lead in chips, catch AA on the button, and have an incredible THREE people go all in ahead of me, which I gladly called - 66, 99 and a Q10 on the short stack. The aces held up, I have a 4-to-1 chip advantage over the other five remaining folks and I’m their hero in a way for getting them into the top 6, which was decent money.
Not as decent as first place, of course - $420 bucks. Heehee! Only downside was my yelp of joy on finishing off the second place guy ($260 or so I believe), drawing the attention of my wife, who now considers this bounty to be hers (or at least, ours), while I was hoping to parlay it into some other payouts. We’ll see.
Its amazing what patience and calculated risk will achieve in online games. In five tourneys w 200 + people I’ve finished 1st, 4th, 10th (w the top nine getting money - geaaaah!) and 13th in a Pokerstars freeroll that started w 6000 entrants. I am by no means anywhere close to being a good player; I have visions of being slaughtered the first time I venture into a real casino table game. But some of the shit people bet w in these online games is unreal (all of us have examples, here’s mine - midway through this game a big stack triples the bb, which is me - I had cowboys, we’re heads up, I take him all in, he calls - 4 8 suited! WTF? he flops a pair, I flop a set, he helped build my stack plenty).
Anyway, no question or point here I guess - just giddiness from parlaying $5.50 into $420 in 3.5 hours. For the month or so I’ve been playing on bodog, I’m bankrolled at $560 off a $40 out-of-pocket investment. Yay!