End of my SNG Drought

After not cashing in 10 SNGs in a row (my worst run in these ever, including a number of very frustrating 4th place finishes) last night I broke the drought by placing second in a $2.50+0.25 game on Poker Champs.

After a very rough start I was lowest chip stack into the final 5 and the blinds were starting to bite. I managed to get myself heads up with decent cards against some of the more passive players at the table and within a few hands I had doubled myself up without showing my cards, the player to my left had gotten tired of me stealing his big blind when action was folded to me on the SB so when I was dealt:

:Kd::Jd:

on the SB and raised, he decided he hand a hand to take me on and called (for the first time in about 5 orbits). The flop could not have been better:

:Th::Kc::Js:

I hit top two pair, there are a couple of straights on the board but my thought here was that he may well have hit the K, I really doubted AQ or Q9. I check. He bets and I call. The turn is fairly harmless:

I decide to bet, around half my stack and he calls. The river is:

and I push all-in, he’s obviously sick of me taking pots without a showdown and calls me (he has me slightly covered). I flip up my top two pair and he mucks his cards. My guess is that he probably did have AK.

I’d now over tripled up in very short time and was chip leader. In the next orbit the shortest stack was put all in by the blinds and the next time the player to the left was on the big blind I bet enough to put him all-in with a fairly weak K6 off-suit, he called me with J4 off and my king high held up to leave us with three players.

The third place player was knocked out by the eventual winner putting me at a slight chip disadvantage heads up and I was forced to push and steal blinds/pots whenever I had slightly good cards. In the end I pushed at the wrong time and had my bluff called when my opponent had paired an unlikely jack on the flop, I didn’t improve and it was all over.

All in all I believe I played a solid game, I changed gears and the right time and really set my self up to win. My heads up play definitely needs some work though and I think experience is the answer, if I can just stop dropping out of these things in 4th place then maybe I can get some more experience in heads up situations.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 12:59 pm and is filed under My Poker Game, Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.