I had a huge score today. I played the $600 40 Million Dollar Guarenteed tourney on Party. There were 1727 players and I finished 2nd. It paid $110,000. This is the biggest score I’ve ever had before, and it feels great.

All the pieces just fell into the right place yesterday. Early on I played a standard tight-solid game, making a few big plays when the opportunity arose. Here’s one that I particularly liked: http://www.pokerhand.org/index.php?page=view&hand=152273
Basically I was representing KQ or AK, and that’s exactly what he put me on. My guess is he had a mid pair like 88 or 99.

Starting with about 60 players remaining, I started to get very cold cards. By the time 20 players were left, I was pretty short stacked. I got very lucky and caught a bunch of hands when my table got 6 handed. I didn’t pick up aces or anything, but just hands like 88 and ATo that I could safely steal the huge blinds with. I went from about 70k to 250k by the time we were down to the final table.

At the start of the final table, I played pretty tight. The prize jumps were pretty big. After a while I realized everyone at the table except for two guys were playing pretty scared. I started stealing a bunch, and even reraising a couple of times, but everyone was just too afraid to put all of their chips in.

I was very fortunate that I never ran into any huge hands on my steals. It’s funny, usually when you think of luck in tournaments, you think of all-in situations and suckouts. In that sense I was actually pretty unlucky. I had one suckout for all of my chips, but that was only a 40/60 situation. Midway through the tournament I lost half my chips with KK vs A5s. Also, during the middle stages, I lost a ton of coinflips.

Don’t get me wrong, I still had to get very lucky to finish second. At the final table, I never ran into any big hands. When I finally did run into AQ, I happened to have AK.

I know I’ve bitched and complained a lot about 25th place finishes and what not. Hopefully that makes a little more sense now. This 2nd place makes up for so many of those finishes. It’s crazy, but the way tournaments are set up, they are so top heavy that you need to get some of these big finishes to be a winner.

The rakeback issue is still up in the air. Basically, rakeback is 100% illegal on Party. I know that high volume players will still look for rakeback even though it’s not allowed, so if you are a very high volume player, email me at ZeeJustin@cox.net and I can point you in the right direction. Several of the major affiliates right now are making promises they can’t live up to, and given the information I have on the subject, I’m in a position where I need to make sure that these guys don’t get away with it.

In the next couple of weeks I hope to branch out as an affiliate to virtually al the other sites that actually do allow rakeback, so I’ll be able to offer all the readers on my site the best deals possible regardless of the volume of play.