So I played the WSOP $5,000 Circuit event at Caesar’s last week. It had about 340 players and I finished 5th for $96,000.

Anyone that reads my blog will know that I was not happy with that finish. I’m not going to even get into why.

One cool thing is now I have a WSOP, WSOP Circuit, EPT, and WPT final table, all under my belt. At only 22, I’m pretty sure I’m the youngest person to do all four of those. Are there even any 22 year olds with three of those? IDK.

As for how the tournament went, Day 1 was the smoothest I’ve ever sailed. I showed up 20 minutes late, and by the end of the first level, I had turned my 10,000 starting stack into 22,000 without even winning any pots over 10k.

At 200/400 Allen Cunningham played a very interesting hand. It folded to me on the button, and I decided to just limp A8o because Allen had a stack of 19 big blinds (7,600) which puts me in a tough spot if he reraises. He moved all-in, and before he even finished pushing his chips in the pot, I realized, “I may have to call this. If he had a monster hand, he would probably just make a raise to 5x or so. There’s a good chance he has nothing here.” Instead, the big blind who had him covered quickly moved all-in, and I had an easy fold.

Sure enough, the big blind had KK and Allen flipped over 96s. I kind of like Allen’s play. Hands like J9s are a big part of my range there, and if I’m willing to raise and call an all-in, I would do that rather than limp. It’s too bad he got caught for all his chips and busted from the tournament.

Well, if you were watching the poker coverage you’d know that’s not true. Allen sucked out on the kings by hitting a six high straight and eventually went on to win the whole tournament.

So like I said, I played very tight on day 1, until the final level. The blinds went from 400/800 with a 100 ante to 600/1200 with a 200 ante. A 1/6th ante is huge, and unless the table is extremely aggressive, it becomes correct to play a lot more hands, especially if you’ve built up a tightish image. I managed to climb from 70,000 to 90,000 chips that level, despite losing a couple of decent sized pots in the process.

Day two was the opposite. I was all over the place. A lost a bunch of all-ins on day 2. I lost KK vs AJ for a pretty big pot, and a bunch of coinflips. I was down to 20k at one point when I got KQ all-in preflop against AQ. I think that was the only time on day 1 or 2 when I got my chips in bad, but luckily I sucked out.

Towards the end of the day, I had Blair Hinkle on my left. He played very aggressively, reraising a lot preflop, so I had to play very tight. I lost some 70/30 and was relatively shortstacked with an aggressive player behind me, which meant I had to play even tighter. I ended up going into the final table with 272,000.
A few hands into the final table, Ben raised from late position, and Blair called in the small blind. I had AK in the BB and moved all-in. Ben folded and Blair tanked for a while before calling with ATs. He flopped a flush draw and I was prepared to go home in 9th. He didn’t hit the flush, however, he did hit a straight to chop the pot. I would have been in amazing shape if I had won that 700k pot, instead I was stuck with a slightly below average stack.

I chipped up through fairly tight play with a couple of well timed steals. I was at about 500k when I went on a mini rush. I raised QQ, Ben raised to 150k, and I moved all-in and he folded. The very next hand, it folded to Ben in the SB. He raised to 60k, and I made it 170k in the BB with TT, he folded.

The very next hand Kelly raised to 90k (blinds were 10k/20k in all of these hands). He had slightly over 600k in chips, and I looked down at TT again!

Kelly had raised to 2.5x with AKs once, and at the 8k/16k level, he opened to 100k and folded to a reraise. Because of those hands, and a couple of others, I wasn’t too scared by his overly large raise amount. For the most part, he was a pretty poor player. He also played fairly scared, and made a couple of very bad laydowns including folding AKs preflop getting 2-1, and folding JJ on a T high flop in a spot where I would have instacalled and been happy about it.

Given all this info, I decided to move all-in. If he had AK or JJ, I thought I might even be able to get a fold. If I was in position, calling would have been a better option, but I didn’t want to play the hand out of position. Unfortunately, he snap called me with queens. I didn’t suck out, and was crippled.

A couple orbits later (with me moving all-in once an orbit and getting no callers), I picked up K3s with 6.5 big blinds in the cutoff. That’s a shove, so I shoved. Allen Cunningham moved all-in behind me with AQ, and I was out of the tournament.

Overall, I’m really happy with the way I played. I ran kind of brutal in all-in situations, losing multiple huge coinflips along the way. If I could have won just one of those crucial hands I would have had a great shot at winning the tournament. Honestly, cant AK hold up vs AT one time? Or maybe just NOT run TT into QQ? At least it wasn’t kings vs. aces.

Anyway, congrats to Allen on the win. I was very impressed with his play. He is a tight player, which is something I generally don’t have very much respect for, because that’s not optimal in tournaments, but Allen is great at taking advantage of his tight image, and knowing who he can push around, and when he can make moves. He’s definitely one of the top 10 tournament players on the circuit.

I have some VERY exciting news, but I can’t talk about it just yet. I’ll let you guys in on that information tomorrow.