With just 18 players left and sitting fifth in chips, I was starting to feel very confident about my chances of winning my third
World Poker Tour title. While there were some excellent players remaining, like J.C. Tran and Kido Pham, there were also some less-experienced players left in the field whom I believed I could take advantage of.
One such player was Bryan Sumner, a newcomer with very little tournament experience. As it turned out, though, Bryan was consistently getting the best of me in hands we played, albeit my losses on each hand were limited.
Bryan was chipping away at me by taking some risks before the flop by "coming over the top" of me. Sometimes I'd call and miss the flop completely, while other times, when I was playing a garbage hand, I just let him take it. I believed that if I was able to get to flops with him, I'd either be able to bluff him out or hopefully force him into a mistake that would cost him all of his chips. My opportunity came in the following hand:
With the blinds at $5,000-$10,000, everyone folded to the player on the button, who limped in. From the small blind, I also limped in with the K
Q
. Bryan, sitting in the big blind, decided to raise it $40,000 more. The button folded, and frankly, I just didn't think Bryan had a strong hand. I thought that he might just be taking a stab at the pot with a hand as weak as, say, A-6, or something to that effect. I decided to call the raise and see a flop.
The flop was no help to me: J
J
4
. I checked, and Bryan followed through with a bet of $40,000. Something about his bet screamed of weakness, but being out of position, a check-raise here would be a risky play. Instead, I decided to flat-call the bet with the intention of possibly stealing the pot on a later street. Remember, up to this point I'd always folded preflop or on the flop when Bryan bet, so with me calling in this case, he should have been worried about my actually having a decent hand.
The turn was a 10. This gave me an open-end straight draw, but it also presented a new dilemma: Should I now check and see if I can make my hand cheaply, or should I seize the moment and follow through with a bluff? Well, since I thought Bryan had a weak hand, it seemed to me that it would be better to steal this pot, because even if I hit my straight on the river, it was unlikely that I'd get a big payday, anyway. Besides, if I checked the turn, it would be even more difficult to get away with stealing the pot from Bryan on the river.
I decided to make a bet that had many purposes - a little bit of a bluff, and a little bit of a defensive bet. I decided to represent a hand like Q-J or A-J, and I bet $40,000. It was a cheapish bet, but I didn't think Bryan would raise me on the turn unless he had a monster hand.
He thought about it for quite a while before finally folding his hand. After reflecting on the hand, I think Bryan actually had a hand like 6-6 or 8-8.
That hand helped me regain some momentum against Bryan, as up until that point he'd absolutely owned me. I went to the final table in second chip position, but then things got ugly. Normally I'd choose an interesting hand from the final table to write about, but this final table ended like no other that I'd ever seen before.
J.C. Tran came to the final table as the short stack, and that kind of screwed up the entire final-table structure. J.C. isn't a slow player, and he didn't do anything wrong at all. What J.C. did, though, was absolutely never admit defeat, and he just wouldn't quit. He nursed that short stack exceptionally well. I was very impressed. As J.C. was nursing and hanging tough, no one went broke for three full levels! We set a
WPT record for most hands played without an elimination.
While the record was interesting, what ensued was the worst form of poker imaginable. The blinds got so high that any sort of post-flop play was not possible at all. It was all in or nothing, and that's a shame, as I was looking forward to the difficult task of trying to outwit the likes of Tran and Pham.
Instead, you saw six players all close to a million dollars in chips, with the blinds at $40,000-$80,000. With the average stack being less than a million, that forced all of the players to go all in when they played. I didn't enjoy it at all, and thought that if I finished third or better, I'd be very happy. It had become nothing more than a card-catching contest. Anyway, I was lucky enough to get all the way to heads up, down 3-1 in chips against, you guessed it, Bryan Sumner! The heads-up match lasted a total of four hands, when my A-3 couldn't outrun his 8-8, and that was that.
WPT events are pretty strange tournaments. Leading up to the final table, you have so much play, and that gives the better players a massive advantage. However, when you get to the final table, the leverage swings back the other way, neutralizing the better players' advantage with a high-speed final-table structure.
Having said that, I'm actually fine with the structure and understand that it's always been that way, and it helps the show get done in a timely fashion. My approach to
WPT events is such that my goal is to simply get to the final table in good chip position. If I'm able to do that, I'm more than happy to roll the dice for millions! I'm just as lucky as the next guy, but it's my skill that will give me more opportunities to roll the dice than my opponents.
