The Mookie and the Daily Double

Last night, like I do every Wednesdays, I played in the Mookie and coming off a solid showing last week where I ended up in second place, I was hoping to do well again this week. I'm certainly not a great tournament player or anything but I feel that my feel for the tournaments is coming back. When I first started playing, tournaments (mainly sit n go's) are all I played. Now, it's mainly cash games but I'm enjoying playing in tournaments as well. Because I'm not a great tournament player, I still feel that tournaments take forever and you could play for hours and not win any money vs in a cash game, if you play solid for the same amount of time, more often than not, I would make money. Having said that, I really want to take one of these MTT's down so I am starting to play in more tournaments (my more tournaments equate to maybe like 4 MTTs each week, including the two blogger tourneys - MATH and Mookie).

So, at 9pm, I fired up Part B of the Daily Double (I meant to sign up for both Part A and Part B but apparently, I missed the registration for Part A) which was a $10+2 entry. Basically, my strategy here was to play tight the first hour and let the donks kill each other while accumulating chips where I can but not getting in a gamble situation (a better side of the coin flip is still considered a gamble situation, in my mind). With 893 runners, I just didn't see the value in doubling my stack that early in the tournament. I know chip accumulation is important but how much value is there in tripling your stack in the first hour vs risking going busto 3 times during that time? Maybe I'm too tight and maybe that's why I'm not a great tourney player but that was going to be my strategy.

At 10pm, the Mookie started and there, I wanted to make sure I played relatively tight but stay aggressive because in these blogger tourneys, aggression is almost the name of the game. I actually played fairly well in both. On the daily double, around the 3rd or the 4th hour, I finally busted, coming out 46th out of 893 runners for a total of a whopping $26.40... barely doubling my buy-in...

In the Mookie, I played fairly well, making decent lay downs (some would probably consider it too tight) and again, not looking to get into a total race situation unless circumstances called for such. Before I knew it, we entered final table play and then this interesting hand came up. I was in the big bling with a relatively short stack and another short stack (we had about the same) goes all in from UTG +1. Now at this point, I figured he'd be pushing with any ace so I was willing to call with my pocket 8's... until this happened...



Another player goes all in... now what do I do? Well, it was a pretty easy fold for me... turns out I had the best hand preflop... but then this happened...



Quads. Wow. I don't know if that was a situation (ignoring the results) where I should have called... scratch that. I don't know if that's a situation where others might think I should have called but in my mind, it was a clear fold. Two all ins? No way my 88 is ahead. And even if it was the best hand preflop, no way it would hold up against two players. So I opted to fold.

Well, eventually, I couldn't make anything of my stack and I was done in 7th place when I jammed my pocket deuces and got called by pocket 7s...



Well, I was relatively happy with my performance considering I made back to back final tables at the Mookie and considering that I'm a self proclaimed tournament donk, that's not too bad at all.