i chopped (i.e. tied for first-place money in) the main event of turning stone’s winter meltdown yesterday for a great start to my new poker year. the old saying goes “you gotta get lucky to win a poker tournament”. yeah, no kidding! yesterday:

• i made quads 3 times. unbelievable. and won important pots all 3 times. on one of those occasions i flopped quad fours and got paid by top pair, and on another one i flopped top set and got it all in behind a flopped flush, made quads on the turn to bust him. later made quad 4s again against a short stack all in, although he was already drawing dead against my set.
• flopped the nuts with a straight flush redraw — T8dd on 9d7d6c flop — and a guy 3-bet me all in on the flop for a lot of chips with a pair of black queens
• at the final table i reshoved tens into chipleader justin’s JJ and got saved on the turn
• also at final table i called tractor-hat don’s all-in with AK vs his A4 for most of my chips. flop T74 but no problem. turn Q, river J.

in addition to having way more than my fair share of luck, i played really well all day. i stole a tremendous number of pots without having to show hands. by the dinner break, i was the chip leader with about 150k chips and and 28 players left. but then came an seemingly endless draught of cards. i didn’t win a real pot for  2 hours and couldn’t find any opportunities to throw the weight of my big stack around. but i weathered the storm. by the time we were in the money i was an average stack but still in ok shape, and when we got to the final table i was one of the shorter stacks with 60k. justin the chip leader had a really big stack, probably like 350k of the 1,070,000 chips in play. the blinds at that point were probably 1500/3000. but after doubling up with TT vs JJ as mentioned above, and then busting a couple of the other shorter stacks, i was definitely back in contention.

when we got to 3 handed it was justin and me and a guy from canada. he played solidly but i could tell didn’t have much short-handed experience. justin was playing really well, but his stack wasn’t as imposing as it had been.

after playing a while 3-handed we stopped the clock to discuss a deal. the canadian guy had taken a couple big pots from the justin and they both had close to 400k, and i had 280k. we were probably at the 3000/6000  level at that point, so there was a lot of play left. an even chop would have got us over $9k each, and a chip-count deal looked like 10k for each of them and over 8k for me, which looked pretty good compared to the $5600 for 3rd. i would have probably taken it, but  justin wanted to play. fine with me… i had the canadian guy on my right, and as suspected he was not comfortable playing short handed at all. we leaned on him hard and dispatched him pretty quickly.

we played heads up for a little while and then stopped again to talk about a deal. at that point the score was 580k for justin and 490k for me, and i didn’t feel either of us had a skill edge. there was $6k real-money difference between 1st and 2nd. i proposed we make a “save” where we each take $10.5k or so and play for the couple grand left over. but the tournament director stepped in and said “you can’t make saves any more. the tournament coordinator says that once a deal is agreed on the tournament has to be over”. we both made a sour face at him, but decided to keep playing. we played for another 30 or 40 minutes  but we were still 50 bb deep (blinds at 5k/10k)  and neither one of us could make much headway. at this point we’d been playing about 15 hours. we got back to dead even, and justin said “ok, wanna chop it up?”. “sold.” but who gets the official “win”? we decided to high-card for it.  i drew a J and was looking good, but he pulled the A of hearts. that’s ok, i took home over $11k so i GUESS  i can live with a 2nd place finish