This is the final part of a three-part series on my performance in the $6,500 main event at the
Master Classics of Poker in November.
After three days of hard work, I had made it to the televised final table as the chip leader. With a first-place prize of $897,000, and not having made any kind of special/percentage deals other than two or three minor swaps, I knew that I was playing for rather life-changing amounts of money here. Still, the money hardly ever crossed my mind. More than anything, I was playing because of the honor of winning a major event. The money - even though the amounts at stake were quite huge - was just a secondary consideration.
Taking my foot off the gas
As I had done a few times earlier in this event, I decided to take my foot off the gas a little at the beginning of this final table. After all, we were ninehanded with quite a few short stacks, meaning the likelihood of getting called and/or running into a big hand was fairly high. This was even more likely, of course, because the previous day, my opponents had seen me raise almost 40 percent of my stack with just the 5
4
, and then even call an additional 40 percent with this 5-high against an all-in reraise. All in all, I knew that even my very large preflop raises would not automatically get a lot of respect - and for this reason, I decided to proceed cautiously.
Well, cautiously to me, that is. In the first two hours of play, I made two massive reraises in situations in which I knew my opponents couldn't call me - and, indeed, they didn't. So, without even just one showdown, and by playing in an unusually tight way (at least in the eyes of my opponents), I had built my stack to more than 1 million, which was about 30 percent of the total amount of chips in play.
Danger to my left
That was the good news. The bad news was that with just five players left now, I had two dangerous players seated to my left. To my immediate left, there was the strong and experienced Jan Sjavik, who has many final tables under his belt, and seated to his left was the chip leader of this event, Alex Jalali. This German had built his stack to almost 1.2 million. That's when the crucial hand of this event came up.
With the blinds at 7,000-14,000 and a 1,000 ante, it was folded to me in the cutoff. I was holding the A
K
. Instead of raising the standard three or four times the big blind, which many players would choose to do in this situation, I decided to stay consistent with my huge overbet type of strategy from the previous days, and made it 120,000 to go. This provided me two benefits. First, it would prevent the strong Sjavik from getting a "cheap" button (having just 360,000, it would cost him one-third of his stack to call and try to outplay me after the flop - which was not a serious option). Second, inasmuch as the players to my left had also been at my table the previous day when I made my crazy moves, I hoped that one of them would find a dominated holding like A-Q or A-J, with which they would decide to commit.
After Jan folded, the small blind, Alex, quickly made it 400,000 to go - in a manner that indicated he could very well hold a big, though dominated, ace. The way he bet, the speed with which he put the chips in, and his general demeanor all seemed indicative of someone who was trying to represent more strength than he actually had. So, I started thinking: "Rolf, it may have worked. You may have put your opponent in the exact situation you wanted."
Please note, though, that Alex was the only player who had me covered. As we were the two clear chip leaders, with the other three players in considerably worse shape than us, common wisdom dictated that the two of us should not clash this early in the action. But, quite frankly, this thought never entered my mind. I was there to win the whole thing, and moving up the money ladder or avoiding risks was not very high on my list of priorities.
Plus, I thought I had the best hand! So, without any hesitation, I moved all in, basically putting the burden on my opponent now. When Alex started thinking for a long time, my thoughts got stronger and stronger that he had specifically A-Q. If so, I would have been successful in getting him in the exact situation that I wanted, as a 3-to-1 favorite to win a 2 million-plus pot. Of course, I would have been more than happy if he had just folded, as I then would have taken 400,000 off his stack without running the risk of getting unlucky. And, of course, it was not certain that he had A-Q. After all, he easily could have A-K, the same hand that I had, or even a medium-sized pocket pair that would be a slight favorite over my big slick.
In the end, Alex did call, tabling the A
K
. In what seemed like an obvious split pot, I was even a tiny favorite because of the two (OK, extremely remote) live flush draws I had, compared to just one for him. When the first card off the deck was the K
, for a heart that we both didn't have, the rest of the hand seemed like just a formality. But, not so! Two spades came on the flop, including the K
, which gave us both trips, and despite my shouting for red cards, another spade came on the turn, and then another one came on the river. My dream of winning the whole thing had been splashed, and finally, I had been the one to be on the unlucky side of things.
Best Dutchman, a great show, biggest tournament win ever - but not the win I wanted
After having been so incredibly lucky on both day two and day three, especially when things mattered most, Lady Luck finally had turned her back on me. Of course, I had no one to blame for this but myself. After all, there was no real need for me to go to war with the only guy who could break me, and I also didn't need to make an opening raise that big. I knew that by playing in that very risky manner, I indeed would maximize my chances of winning the event, but the risk of busting out prematurely also would be much higher than with a more "normal," more "conservative" approach. In the end, one could say that this strategy of mine finally backfired. Still, I tend to look at things from a different perspective; namely, that with A-K versus A-K at a fivehanded table, and especially with a flop of K
K
6
, the money would have gone in anyway.
All in all, with a $110,000 check for fifth place, my biggest-ever tournament win by a large margin, and with the excellent showing I had made on nationwide TV, I guess I had no reason to complain. Possibly, I had gotten even more than I deserved, when looking at my crucial drawouts the previous days. Of course, it was my strategic plays, my excellent maneuvering, and my good sense of when to change gears that had put me in this winning position to begin with. That I then wasn't able to finish things off was indeed quite disappointing, but I guess not more disappointing than it must have been for the people I had outdrawn in previous days.
Some final words
Anyway, that was that for my first-ever main event at a major tournament. Right after this event, I headed to Singapore, where I would be involved in my second-ever main event. How I blew my chips in that one will be the subject of my next two columns.
Rolf Slotboom is a longtime professional, specializing in limit hold'em, pot-limit Omaha, and, more recently, no-limit hold'em ring games. He is the co-author of Hold'em on the Come, the author of the upcoming book Pot-Limit Omaha My Way, the commentator for the Eurosport EPT broadcasts, and the Card Player Europe bureau chief. He is the semiofficial 2005 Dutch Champion, and maintains his own site at www.rolfslotboom.com.
