PLAYING POKER FOR A CHANCE TO WIN A SEAT IN A WSOP EVENT

Well, it appears that I'm not doing too badly at poker. I won my second tournament and let me tell you...THAT was a ride. There were 19 people in this one and we were playing for entries into the next WSOP (World Series of Poker) satellite which is this Saturday. 1st and 2nd place automatically get entered into Saturday's tournament without having to pay and 3rd place got like $24. Whoever wins Saturday's tournament gets a prize package to play in a $10,000 +$200 WSOP event in either Las Vegas, New Orleans, or Lake Tahoe which will be televised on ESPN. Plus the winner gets $1800 in travel expenses, dinner with some of the professionals and a bunch of gear. At this point, even 7th place gets about $440, so there's a little money to be won.

At first, all I was wanting to do was play well, and I didn't want to be first out. The first 5 dropped quick. Before I knew it, I was 11 out of 14, then 7 out of 9, then 5 out of 7, 1 out of 7 and back to 5 out of 7. And then there were 5. We played for a while with 5. The blinds were increasing fairly rapidly and I was 4 out of 5 and then 5 out of 5 for quite a while. The chip leader had about 13,000 to 14,000 chips. At this point I was at about 500 and there was a sizeable jump from me to the next highest. So I figured I'd be out next, but finishing fifth wouldn't be too bad for this being my first real tournament against more than one other person. I forgot what I had, but it was something playable, and I had to post the big blind, which was $200, so I had $300 left. I called another bet and I had $250 left. I won and was back up to $1500 or so, so I was back in the game.

From there, I just kept gaining and gaining. Even though I was still had the lowest number of chips, we ended up with four people left after a couple went all in. I had already folded. So now there were four. I was still in last place as far as chips go. I won a few more hands and now I was in third place as far as chips. This was my most interesting hand, I believe. I had pocket tens and I had posted the big blind. 2 people folded and it was me and the person with just a few less chips than me. The flop came up 9,10,9. I now had a full house, so I started raising. He called, and he raised me. I called him. The turn card came up a 2. He checked. I went all in. He called. Since we were both all in at this point, we showed our cards. He had pocket aces. But by this time, when he saw my full house, he knew there was nothing much he could get to beat me. With pocket aces, I probably would have done about the same thing he did. It just didn't pay off for him. So then there were 3.

Now I was up to $14,000 in chips and I was leading by at least $5000. We took a break. The one guy was pissed because he'd seen I had $500 that one time, so he tried to bust me and now I was in front. I took him out with 3 of a kind and he typed a whole bunch of obscenities at me. Hell, he got $24, so I don't know what he was so upset about... Then it was 2 of us and I had $20,000 and he had about $5000. We both had aleady won entries into Saturday's tournament by now so it didn't really matter who was first or second, except for bragging rights. We were posting $800 blinds and $25 ante as well. A few minutes later I had him all in and I took it. It may not have mattered who was second or who was first, but I wanted to be #1 and I knew I could take this guy since I had $15,000 more in chips than he did.

So yay! I won! I won! *jumping up and down* Now the hard part starts. Saturday's tournament won't just have 19 in it. It will have a little more than 60 people. And most all of them got there the same way I did, fighting their way up in a smaller tournament. Still, no matter what, I think it's going to be fun. It was easy to be a little aggressive in this tournament, because it was easy to scare people off. However, I doubt it's going to be quite as easy to do that Saturday, but we shall see.

So who knows? You might end up seeing me on ESPN sometime.