Struggle

Placed 2nd in an 8 person HORSE SnG. It was a struggle all the way to the end though.

I couldn't get anything going in the beginning. I would win a medium sized pot and then go card dead for twenty hands. Basically, my stack stayed pretty much even from the beginning through the first 5 levels of play (which is all 5 games). Eventually though, patience once again proved to be the best virtue as I managed to slip into second place as people around me started to get knocked out. I had a particularly good round of razz and then a good stud hi/lo round.

Into heads up play, I was a huge underdog, somewhere in the vicinity of a 8-1 chips stack underdog. The blinds weren't great for my stack either as I was floating somewhere around the 10 bet range.

I managed to battle back to a 2-1 underdog thanks to a good run in stud hi and stud hi/lo. I was pretty amazed and started to really give it my all. I knew that he had to be feeling pretty shitty after letting me catch up so drastically.

Unfortunately, things started to slow down in the hold em round and eventually I just couldn't hit a flop to save my life. It was becoming dangerous to attempt to steal too because if I was wrong, then I lost a good portion of my stack. Near the end of the round, however, things started to go back my way. Going into the Omaha Hi/Lo round, I was a little worse than a 2-1 underdog again.

This was bad though because the blinds were so high that by this point I needed to have evened things up if I hoped to push through to a win. Since that wasn't the case, however, I was going to need some pretty good luck. On the first hand of Omaha Hi/Lo I managed to turn an ace high straight and I got him to pay me off. Things were looking up. Then I lost a pretty sizable pot with queens up with threes because he also had queens up threes but with a better kicker.

All of a sudden, I was an 8-1 chip underdog again and this time, I only had about 2 or 3 bets in me. Basically, I could really only get involved in one hand.

I hit another killer hand where I thought I would win both the high and the low, but managed to lose my 8-7 low to his 8-6 low and then we split the high pot. The next hand was my last, as I managed to flop top pair with a jack, but he turned a queen. With no low on the board, he scooped it and I was out.

I was rather happy with my play though. For a while there, it looked like I was about to overcome crazy odds. I battled back very well and hung on for an entire rotation despite my stack size compared to the blind size. In the end though, his chip lead was too much to overcome in too little time. I got unlucky at the worst moments but played an amazing heads up game that I feel really good about.