Played my SCOOP event

A month or two back I scored a $33 ticket for the SCOOP in the WBCOOP. Try saying that ten times quickly ...

I found the events available for a $33 ticket were fairly slim pickings. I was hoping to try a short handed fixed limit holdem tournament, but there are not many of them on the schedule (maybe 1 or 2 max) and they were not for $33.

My next choice was trying to find a normal NL tournament, but again, there weren't many options, so I had to settle for a 4-max NL tourney this morning. Even though I play 6max normally, i'm not super strong at the very short games in my opinion. I'm probably still a bit too tight.

I think there were about 8,000 entrants, with the top 1,200 being paid, but you really needed to make the top placings to make some decent cash. 1,200th paid about $40 from memory. I played a reasonably tight game, running somewhere at about 35/25, and probably folded too much from the blinds, but it also worked for me in that when I did come in to a hand I often was able to steal it away either preflop or on the flop.

I was also able to let some of the more aggro guys bet into me and either check / raise and bet or call them down depending on how big their stack was and how likely they were to bluff into me when I held a very strong hand. I took out about four players like that.

Possibly the most interesting though was when two guys were having a go at each other in the chat box and eventually they ended up all in on a hand with one guy holding AK and the other holding A7 with the flop K7x. Blank turn, but the guy with A7 spiked his two outer 7 on the river. Unfortunately for him though, he'd already closed the table, so he was automatically sitting out until he bled off all his chips. He still had about 3k chips at the time when the average was 10k so he wasn't really out of it.

Basically I stayed just under the average stack for a few hours, and squeaked into the money with about 25k chips left when the average was probably 40k and blinds at 200/400ish. Once the bubble burst I went completely card dead though, and even though I did last to the top 750 or so, eventually my push with K8s for 10bbs was called by a larger stack with K9o. I flopped the flush draw, but no help and i'm out for about $50.

I played a cash table at the same time for only the first hour or so until the fish ran out. After that I only played the tournament, just so I could concentrate and get the most out of the experience. In the end it was beginning to test my concentration span though, so i'm still fairly sure tournaments aren't the way for me to go.

Current bankroll: $26,450
May time played: 8.7h
May hands played: 2,196
May profit / (loss): $650