Best Poker Weekend Ever - Part One

I guess taking a break is good. The first part of my best poker weekend ever did not encourage me to believe that anything had changed. I played the $25 Crazy Moose Saturday morning tournament, even though I said I would not play 10-minute blind round tournaments anymore. Bad girl. I did OK for a while, but ended up having to go all-in with pocket queens, which is not a problem, but Dusty called with A-K and spiked a king, so I was done.

As I was just about to leave, someone (I think it was Roland) asked me if I was going to play the free roll and I said I didn't really care for them. He said it was "customer appreciation day" and that there was a special free roll with prizes of $500 for first, $300 for second and $200 for third. There was a 10:00 flight and a 3:00 flight. The top 20 from each flight would come back to play a 40-person final at 7:00. I decided to try it. What the heck. I went grocery shopping and came back by 10:00.

Thus began my wonderful poker weekend, although I did not know it at the time because my tournament did not start out very well. I simply caught no cards at all and was down to only 600 fairly quickly. Yikes. Under the gun I stared at pocket rockets. 99% of the time I would raise with these little beauties, but I was desperate and so I limped in. I got SIX callers. Help!

Someone raised in late position and that put me all-in. I called and we still had five players to the flop. Unbelievably, my aces held up and I was off and running. I ended the flight as one of the top 20 with 7,000 in chips, which was about average. We carried our chips to the final table and the blinds would start at 100-200, so I felt very comfortable.

Now, my only problem was, what to do with time to kill from 11:50 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. Off to Joker's I went for the 12:30 $60 deep stack. TO BE CONTINUED . . .