First gets 100k and second gets 35k. No chops.

SO SICK.

At least I'm unstuck for the month/year

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I thought overall Viejas was an above average tournament venue. The casino seems to be well run, there was a couple of hiccups with the floor but the guy running the show for the final table was knowledgeable which was nice. There was a subway within walking distance for breaks, there weren't really any lines of people to speak of, and it wasn't a far drive from SD. Compared to Rincon, which is a total hellhole service-wise, I was very happy with Viejas Casino.

The sick thing about this tournament (which you must note when I explain the HU) is that the guarantee on this tournament was 100k to first, so they spread out the prizepool accordingly. This meant that second only got 35k, and no chops were allowed, meaning HU was gonna be super sick (just the way I like it!).

There were a couple glaring probs with the way the tournament was run, though; the dumbest thing about this tournament was the chips. The biggest chip in the entire tournament was a purple $2500 chip, so you can understand the mindfuck once it got down to the final table and the blinds were in the 15k/30k range, and all you had were $500 and $2500 chips. HU was so retarded that the dealers insisted on counting the betsizes in turns of the literal amount of chips (eg "small blind 8 purples, big blind 16 purples". Simple bets had to be counted down because a preflop open could be 40 chips. The floor actually had a great solution for the problem, which was to insist that all final-table players use racks for their stacks of chips. So preflop 3bets meant throwing in a rack, which was pretty sick =)

EDIT* - forgot to mention that there were no numbers on the chips either. just the colors. and the chips were same quality as the kinds you buy in vanity chip sets. super easy to counterfeit, scarily so.

As for my day, it was full of ninja'ing. Checking my texts with friends, I only saw a few hands of substance, and my memory is hazy already (especially when betsizes were impossible to remember because of the $2500 chip fiasco). I continue to ninja until there were 7 or so people left, at which point I found 99 OTB in a standard "jam any 2" spot and the middle aged unknown in the SB actually made a really surprising(ly good) call with KQ, but the board ran low and I held. With maybe 5 or so people left I woke up with KK when a tight player reshoved over the bigstacks open with 99 (more on the bigstack later.

With 4 remaining I got in a 3way allin when the BTN jammed 10bbs w/ A8, I iso'd ATo in the SB, and the shortest stack in the BB woke up with AK. I held over the A8 and the AK tripled, so that left me even'ish with the other shortstack while the bigstack had a huge lead.

Only a few hands later, I got AA in the BB and the button made some absurd 6x open and snapped off my shove with JJ. MBN to me me. I got HU with 800k or so versus the 2.4million of Peter "Young MAN" Tran.

Now about this charming fellow: The big stack the entire way was this asian guy named Peter Tran, who was easily top 5 most psychotic I have ever encountered, and he's a very nice guy who calls everyone "YOUNG MANNN".

And it's not exactly psycho in the bad sense, it's just the kind of psycho that I guess you should expect from aggressive players in California casinos. Very often his aggression was unmerited, but in a tournament where everyone was pretty weaktight its not hard to see how he racked up the chiplead Jamie Gold-style and cruised into HU.



He had an actual fortress of chips throughout the entirety of day 2. When everyone had 1 rack worth of chips, he had about 10 racks.

His steal% from any position was about 80, and while he was kinda tame wrt 3betting he was batshit psycho postflop. Multiple times he made bluffraises with zero apparent fold equity on a reshove, only to fold against a reshove.

One example was a hand he played versus a Palomar reg friend of mine named Jake. Jake 3bet oop w/ AA, Tran defended and the flop came some cards. Jake bet, and Tran just took a couple of handful of chips and slung them into the middle. When the dealer confirmed to Jake it was a raise, Jake shoved. It was at this point that the dealer discovered that Tran put in a few bb's less than a raise, so there was a massive floor mindf*ck as to how to treat the situation. Anyhow, Tran had put in like 70% of his stack and folded eventually.

Another time Tran defended an EP raise from a very tight ABC player, and when the flop came 882cc he checkraised the minimum, which was 80% of the guys stack. The guy shoved, and Tran folded.

So it was pretty clear he was ubermonkey with opens (but he usually minraised so that part was pretty profitable) and monkey postflop.

Now I got HU with him, and SECOND HAND of HU I get AA in the BB. I 3bet, he defends with 53o and shoves over my cbet on a JT5hh flop. Street poker! I hold and double, and now cover him barely.

The next 6 or so hands it seems like he's pretty tilted, resulting in him opening every single hand and me folding some buttons. It seems apparant to me that he's going to try and win every single pot, so with 40bb effective I tried to figure out the best plan, which at the time was "minraise every button and play street poker".

So I raise Q5o, Tran defends. Flop Comes 884r, Tran checks and I bet 95. Tran makes it 200. We have about 1.5 million effective, and I can already see the 5bet. It's like the Ivey versus Jackson hand at Aussie Millions, I just had this very solid feeling that the Yeti theorem (everyone is bluffing when multiple bets go in on dry boards) was in effect here and the optimal way to play the hand was give him enough rope and jam on him. I was convinced that if I 3bet and he flatted that I was toasty, but if he reraised it was pretty obvious he had nothing. So I made it 325, he made it 500, and I jammed on him.

I had visions of Ivey versus Jackson. I just knew how sick the play was and it felt PERFECT.






























Sadly he had Q8o. CRAP. That left me with 5bbs, and I busted A5s to QJo.

I dont really regret the way I played at all, I think I played about perfect for this tournament. It was very super-turbo esque, but I was able to maneuver with 20bb with a shocking amount of room, because everyone was giving me walks in spots where shoving ATC was 100% standard. Thus I was able to ninja-attack with precision.

Anyways, I'm gonna relax for most of Monday and finally knock out the 2nd part to my video once my brain un-melts.

Later!