2005 WPT Championship

The 2005 WPT Championship event at Bellagio was a real roller coaster for me. The tournament was broken into two fields, and I played in the first day's field of players. I loved the structure of the event, as everyone started with $50,000 in chips and the blinds slowly increased from their starting point of $50-$100. With such deep stacks relative to the blinds, this structure provided a lot of post-flop play even fairly late in the tournament, provided one kept accumulating chips, of course!


I caught a few very good breaks on day one. I busted the fantastic Hoyt Corkins when I flopped a 10-high flush against his 8-high flush on the Q J 3 board, which took me to more than 100K in chips fairly early in the day. I also made jacks full and quad jacks to win two nice pots and I also got lucky on a bluff with 7-4 offsuit to make the dummy end of a straight and beat a set of nines to propel my chip count to about 132K at the end of the day.

Day two was a completely different story. Initially, everything went wrong, and I mean everything. In the first two hours of play, I won only one pot when I saw a flop, and it was a small one, at that. I was getting dealt rags, and when I did decide to play, my opponents raised and reraised me as if they had planes to catch. I was ground down to 85K when a huge pot developed between Paul Nuygen and me. We got all the money in on the turn, and I was trailing his K-K with the 6 5 on the 7-6-3-Q board with two clubs. I had 17 outs, needing to catch a 4, 5, 6, or club to win this monster pot, but the A came on the river and I was left with a meager $3,500 in chips, which was about 2 percent of the amount of chips with which I started the day.



I was very distraught at this point and broke out my headphones to try to soothe my nerves and figure out how I went from having lots of chips to almost no chips in just a few hours, and what I was going to do now.

A few hands later, I was dealt K-J offsuit in early position and put my remaining $3,500 into the pot with the blinds at $500-$1,000 with $100 antes. The player to my immediate left called, and then the player to his immediate left raised. I figured my hand was in a lot of trouble. The player to my immediate left folded, I flipped over my measly K-J, and my opponent flipped over pocket jacks. Fortunately, the board came A-K-Q and his jacks got no help, so I almost quadrupled my stack in this hand, taking my $3,500 to 13K.


From there, I won several pots without facing elimination and got my stack back up to around 40K when the following hand came up. The blinds were $600-$1,200 with $200 antes. A fairly loose player raised from early position, making it $3,600, and another player whom I didn't know well called his raise. I looked down on the button to find K-Q offsuit. I often just call in this spot, but there was already more than $10,000 out there and I figured I could likely pick it up if I moved all in with my sub par hand. I wasn't too worried about the open-raiser, as he was also pretty short-stacked and would call with only a premium hand. I was just hoping that one of the blinds wouldn't pick up a big hand and that the unknown player who had me well covered hadn't smooth-called the initial raise with a big hand.

The blinds folded and the loose player thought for a bit and folded, but the unknown player counted out my raise, almost another 37K, and called with A-K, putting me in bad shape for all of my chips yet again. I got lucky on the flop once again, as it came Q-X-X, and a king on the river sealed the deal, propelling me to almost 100K in chips. I won a few smaller pots before my table was redrawn, and had about 115K when I was moved to a table in the main tournament area.

My results on this new table were pretty rocky. I initially built my stack up to more than 140K. It felt good to have more chips than what I started the day with after being down to almost nothing. But then, my stack began to slide – first to 120K, then to 100K, and then down into the 80s.

With 20 minutes left in the day and the blinds at $1,000-$2,000 with a $300 ante, the following hand occurred. Dave Colclough, a strong European player who had been torturing me all day, limped in for 2K from first position and I looked down to see my first big pocket pair of the tournament, two black kings. I raised, making it 9K total, and everyone folded back to Dave.

He had been coming over the top of me all day, and he quickly reraised me another 21K. I thought for a minute and decided that if he had aces, I was going to get my money in with the worst of it again. I moved all in, raising him another 47K or so. Dave thought for a few minutes and finally called with the A K, having me greatly covered. The flop came Q-10-10 with two diamonds, and I could feel great despair creep into my spine, as this was a huge flop for Dave. The 4 came on the turn, leaving me drawing to two tens or the case king. A blank came off, and I was eliminated from the tournament.

Playing tournaments is very tough in general, and this tournament was exceptionally tough for me. I played my heart out for two days, and went through an incredible emotional roller coaster as my chip stack rose and fell dramatically, only to have the tournament end with the turn of one card. I waited two days to get all of my chips in as the favorite, and then all I could do was hope that my hand would stand up so that I could stay in the tournament to repeat the process again and again until I had all of the chips or, much more likely, none at all. I really wanted to do well in this tournament, and even when I was incredibly short stacked, I never gave up hope, and for that I am very proud of myself. I can't wait to play the WPT Championship next year, and have another shot at it!

Thomas "Thunder" Keller is a 24-year-old professional poker player and one of poker's young and rising stars. He can often be found playing at Ultimatebet.com under the name gummybear. To learn more about him, go to his website at www.thunderkeller.com.