Mondays at the Hoy, and a Lateish Bounce From the 20k

As you know last night was the weekly Mondays at the Hoy tournament, where we saw 21 players playing for 3 payouts, including a first place prize of $210, so there was a lot at stake for the players' $20 buyins this week. I always love this tournament because it's my first crack at the bloggers since the previous Thursday in any organized way, and when I'm looking forward to playing together that can be a long time to go between the satisfaction I get from trying to publicly humiliate you all on the virtual felt. Seriously. Last night was fun as always, and I noticed that, just like in Byron's wpbt tournament on Sunday night this week, some of the more elusive bloggers suddenly popped up to play, which is always fun. We had our regulars, my home game boys drraz (second player out last night) and jeciimd (11th place last night), Jules (8th place), Surf (9th place) SoxLover (who scored another Hoy cash in 2nd place overall), 23skidoo (14th place), Kat (17th place) and NewinNov (3rd place, another Hoy cash for Newin as well), plus some rarer surprises like Wes (12th place), Joanne (13th place) and Byron (16th place) both playing in their second or third straight Mondays at the Hoy tournament, and even the Angry Dwarf himself made an appearance, ending in 10th place and just missing the venerated final table at pokerstars. In the end yours truly was the bubble boy, when I got too excited with my Ace in this situation:



and then I donkeycalled Newin's allin preflop raise and ran into this:



Laughably poor play by me in the end, but I played great throughout the tournament up to that point, and given my impressive list of MATH failures thus far, this one has to go up there among the best performances I have churned out for my own weekly tournament. And speaking of great performances, Newin ended up taking home $84 for 3rd place, Soxy $110 for second, and your latest Hoy weekly champion is....
Hacker59, taking home I believe his first Hoy cash and first Hoy title. Here is the final leaderboard:



and congrats again to our three cashers, Hacker59, SoxLover and NewinNov. Hope to see you all next week, same bat time and same bat place.

Oh yeah -- one more reason I like the Hoy tournament: the Hammer Reraise is always welcome here (this one led to folds all around last night):



Heh heh.

So I know you're all wondering now how did the 20k go for me last night, and how did I eventually bust out? It went fairly well -- once again I managed to go well into the second hour and to the top 30th percentile of the total players in the event. It seems like every night these days I am making a deepish run in the 20k on full tilt or the 40k on party, which I also ran deep into last night before pushing too hard with middle pair on a short stack. But in the 20k, I was dealt 77 in the big blind. It was folded around to the cutoff, who was on a huge stack and who raised preflop from the 150-300 blinds to 1500. I called with my 7's, with a chip stack of around 10,000 before I made the call. Then the flop came out KK4, with two hearts. Even though my opponent had raised preflop, he was raising from a huge chip stack, and was doing so seated squarely in steal position from the cutoff in an unraised, unentered pot, so I could not put him on a pocket pair, which would mean that the only way I was realistically behind here was if he happened to hold one of the two remaining Kings in the deck. Given how unlikely that was, and thus how likely it was for my pair of 7's to be best on the flop, I led out with a pot-sized bet, designed to take it down right then and there. The problem was, he responded by pushing allin, a massive overbet to the pot and to the size of my remaining chip stack:



Despite this reraise, my opponent's huge stack and the paired Kings on the board led me to believe he was likely on some kind of a steal with this reraise, and I also figured he was likely to push there as well with any 4 in his hand to give him two pairs on the flop. So I called, really only fearing him having one of the two remaining Kings in the deck:. He showed his cards:



and IGH. Now, in retrospect, this was not the way I want to play in this situation, getting down near the money spots in a large mtt like this, but I'm not going to kill myself over this play. With only one King (or certainly an Ace) on the board I could have more readily believed my opponent was holding one of the remaining Kings. With him having a shorter stack I could have more readily believed he might only play hard with the goods to back it up. But in this situation, and especially with the non-paired flop card (the 4) being below my pocket pair of 7's, I actually don't mind the call from a pure poker equity sense.

What I do question is my timing with this play. With a stack of around 10,000 chips, I was just above average at this point in the tournament, doing well and once again well on my way to a finish somewhere in the cash positions in the event. But I jeopardized that entire hard-earned stack on a hand where I go no fold equity (because I called the allin instead of raising allin myself), and where I was behind if my opponent had just the top card on the flop. Although I know it was mathematically very unlikely for my opponent to have another King in his hand, there were still two remaining so his chances weren't exactly infinitesimal. In the end, I like the chance I took, but I would rather be making this kind of a play against a much smaller stack, or at least not until a bit later in the tournament. Still, I am much more pleased about this elimination than many of my recent ones in the 20k guaranteed tournament, and I'm glad again to have made a nice run and gotten my stack over 10,000 at some point for I believe the third straight time I've entered this event.

In all, I lost a couple of bucks on the night, but I had a great time doing it, and in the end I actually am pretty pleased with my play overall. 4th place in the Hoy, equalling my best finish, and then another run a couple of hours deep into both the 20k and the 40k. It could be a lot worse.

See you tonight in Wil's WWdN tournament at 8:30pm ET on pokerstars. Password is "monkey" as always. I'm looking for my second WWdN win in a month tonight, and with me moderating my aggression I'd like to see one of you try to knock me out tonight. Punks.