Turning Stone Tourney

[djm182]

Since I play exactly one live session per year, I like to post about it. This was the $70 NLHE donkament at Turning Stone yesterday.

First hand, I limp in with 2-2 from the button. Four to the flop. I flop bottom set on an all-diamond board. Two checks, the cutoff bets and I call. The other two stragglers fold. Turn is a blank. Cutoff bets and I raise it. He calls. I now have my information. River is a blank and we check-check it. He had JdTd for the flopped (4th nut) flush. Down ~1250 chips. Oh joy.

I then proceed to flop two more sets in the first 1.5 laps around the table, including payback on the villain in the hand above. I raised UTG w/ JJ. He called from the BB. Flop is J-high rainbow. He leads, I raise and he calls. Turn is a K and he shoves. I call and crack his AA. Mama always told me not to get too tricky with AA. After this, I'm up over 10k chips or +2x the starting stack.

Fast forward to the two-hour break and I have 20k chips, or about 2x the average stack of the 48 remaining players. I'm probably in or near the Top 10 at this point, based on a quick visual inspection on the way out of the room for the break.

After the break, I played for about 1hr more. I folded a bunch, took blinds + antes with an EP raise with AQdd, a couple laps later took blinds and antes with a cutoff raise with KTdd (getting the BB to fold A9 face up), then busted when I shoved after it folded to me in the SB with stupid AT. The BB woke up with QQ, had me covered and that was that.

Edit: I shipped with about 14k at the 800/1600/300 level

So, how do you go from a real good position at the break to that bustout? A very fast structure helps. So does playing six-handed for a while with ~35 left. We had a couple double-bustout hands and the floor seemed pretty slow to respond to shift people to our tables. Ultimately, I just couldn't find the right cards or the right situations to make something happen.

Here's the structure to the tourney (apologies for the formatting): Are these Level 9/10 antes unusually high for other twice daily tourneys?
Level Small Blind Big Blind Ante
1 $25 $50
2 $50 $100
3 $75 $150
4 $100 $200 $25 25% SB
5 $200 $400 $50 25% SB
6 $300 $600 $75 25% SB
Break: Color-up and race off $25 chips
7 $400 $800 $100 25% SB
8 $600 $1,200 $200 33% SB
9 $800 $1,600 $300 38% SB << I busted here
Break: Color-up and race off $100 chips
10 $1,000 $2,000 $500 50% SB (WTF!!)
11 $1,500 $3,000 $500 33% SB
12 $2,000 $4,000 $500 25% SB
13 $3,000 $6,000 $1,000 33% SB
14 $4,000 $8,000 $1,000 25% SB

[Snuffy]

Antes are high in a couple spots but the structure looks pretty standard to me, not great, nut not bad either.

On the last hand just raise to 4k and re-evaluate after he no doubt shoves. No use shoving there IMO buy if you raise/fold that leaves you with 6bbs. Meh, I guess it was played fine.

[Rant2112]

Live tourneys are tough. There is no way for the structure to be good and for the tournament to end.