Day Four

I enter Day Four knowing I have won a minimum of 65,000 AUD and if I can go back to surviving ahead of four players I can get to 100,000 AUD and then get aggressive. In hindsight I played my worst poker of the tournament on day four.

Chip leader on my table is Max Bracht with 837,000 and I am in third but after only an hour have lost over 100,000 in blinds and antes, raising once with AQ but getting no callers. Alexander Kostritsyn however, starting the day on 366,000 gets involved in hands right from the start and is up to 1,200,000 by the time I decide to make a stand with AK and am up against his QQ (that hand again).

Alexander had made his by now standard pre-flop raise of around 3 times the BB, which I reraised and he reraised me all-in. I did think afterwards that obviously I could have just flat called his raise and had the chance to get out of it on the Queen high flop. But I’m guessing he would have checked with his trips and I’d have been all-in after the Ace on the turn so the outcome would have been the same.

One of the things I will remember most of the whole experience is the friendliness of all the players I sat with over the four days and I think I was almost as sad to be missing out on the continuing pitting of wits as much as the next payout levels.

I will leave you to look up for yourself how Alexander went on to lift the trophy, and congratulations to him. He was about the strongest player I sat with for any length of time and deserved his victory.

As for me I just want to do it all again as soon as possible. I shall be back in Melbourne next January to defend and improve on my 19th place if I can, but will be playing some UK tournaments before then to see if my game has genuinely improved.

As has been reported elsewhere, I am not foolish enough to think this means I am ready to take on the world’s best but I shall be trying.