FTOPS Main Event

On a whim yesterday, since I've been playing pretty well and getting good results in the past week, I decided to let myself buy in to the $500+35 FTOPS Main Event, which drew over 5000 entrants. A tournament with that many entrants has to be pretty soft, I figured.

It was, and I found my first table pretty easy, and unfortunately was transferred off of it in the first half hour. I still managed to chip up from my starting stack of 7500 up to about 9000 or so.

The second table was a bit tougher, and I lost some of my chips there. There was still a table donk, who will come into the picture again later, and I lost a pot to him as he made a small open raise from UTG and I called with TT. He bet half-pot on a 9 high board and I called, we checked a deuce turn, and he checked a deuce river to see me value-own myself for 2/5 pot. He had QQ (this wasn't a hand that established him as the table donk, he played it reasonably; other hands gave him that label). I missed two straight draws given good odds and was down to 5800 chips when the following hand occurred.

Blinds are 40/80. I raise to 200 from early MP with JJ and a good player on the button calls. The donkey is in the SB and 3bets to 680, both I and the button call.

Flop is 7TJ. Nice.

Even nicer, the donkey friggin' SHOVES, a 10k bet into a 2k pot. I only had ~4800 left in my stack, and I forget what the button's stack was. I instacall of course, and the button folds. The donkey shows about what I expected him to have AdKd.

The turn bricks off and the river is a fucking queen.

Donkaments are soulcrushing.

Even worse, a regular at the NL200 tables, mariojr, went super deep in the tournament, finishing 38th for $7675 in prize money. Ordinarily I'd feel good for one of my peers to have such a good result except mario is not a good player - he is a clear and unabashed rakeback pro whose play is so uninspiring that he actually had to endure some very serious accusations as to being a bot a while back.

This tournament score represents approximately 357,000 NL200 hands for him at his typical winrate (it would represent less than 60k for me).