Hey, just had a very nice result, finished 10th in LA Poker Open $1600 for 10K. I started day 2 with only 10 big blinds, 72 out of 75 in chips. Really played my A game in my estimation, very pleased with my poker right now.

However…..naturally there is one hand I'm forced to brood over: not a strategically fascinating hand and i don't think it was played that poorly but I think it might be instructive to my fellow MTTers to discuss when to “switch gears”. I was short stacked the first five or six hours and then had one nice rush with about forty players left to chip up but then lost aipf JJ<A9 to one shorty and was forced to fold my QQ on 875 board when two players shoved over me (55 and 87). I then had another rush that saw me win three hands in one orbit where I knocked out 2 players and dragged a pot after a light 3bet with Q8 (the villain folded A10 faceup…that could be another discussion, the play was pretty poor, every player loved telling you what they had…never had an easier time ranging my tablemates). after starting the day with 40,500 I was up to 880,000 chips with 22 players remaining. I was now the second biggest stack at my table and the chip average was around 450,000. the blinds had just gone from 8,000/16,000 to 10,000/20,000 with a 3K ante when I played the following hand…

It folds around to me in the small blind and I have 9d7d. The villain to my left is a young player who might be a pro or a solid recreational player, i've only played with him for an hour but i haven't noticed anything exploitable in his game and he is very relaxed (unlike some of the other players he doesnt seem overly excited and i assume he has run deep in tourneys before). He has around 550,000 chips to start the hand. I've already played 2 blind vs blind hands with the villain, the first time I raised and he folded and the second time I just mucked a crappy hand (J3 I think). I decided I was going to limp raise my 97. I was convinced the villain would raise every single time I limped and I would get a fold 80%plus of the time I took this line: I wanted to not only steal the bb and antes but get him to give me a few more chips. I limped and he took about fifteen seconds before he put in a bunch of orange 5K chips and raised from 20 to 80K. I waited a few seconds before announcing “raise” and tossing in five 25K chips. This is the worst part of the hand, I didnt take any time to study his bet and didnt think for a second about my sizing. I'm embarassed to say I didnt even stop to study his raise, I was expecting him to 3x to 60 and when he made it 80 I made it 145K, basically a min raise. There was now 246K in the pot and he only needed 65K to make the call. Yikes! I was giving him better than 3.5 to 1 odds to call. Now I guess if I had a big pair I would make a raise of similar sizing but the bottom line is that I didnt even pause to calculate the optimal sizing (or, for that matter, to consider aborting my limp raise plan). the villain called pretty quickly. the flop was 6h6s5s. i flopped a gutter ball. any thought on what to do now?

my thinking was that i pretty much had to cbet and stay with my big hand story. looking back i wonder if i could have just check folded here and minimize the damage or tried an underbet of 100k to make it look like i was trying to induce and also to minimize the losses if he shoved over me. anyway, i cbet 175k and the villain tanked for about 20 seconds and i pretty much knew what was coming and he announced all in and of course i folded. i don't hate the way i played this hand to be honest, i think i made a strong play and just ran into it…villain might have had JJ and just wanted to see undercards before he committed his stack, not sure. but i don't want to be easy on myself here: the bottom line is that i decided to rep a very narrow range against a solid player out of position. i had a friend railing me who is an excellent player who said my line was fine and i just got unlucky but questioned my overall “philosophy”, why not after getting all the chips just hang back and play hands for value and take the obvious spots rather than jumping into boss/bully mode? i could easily have won this hand instead of handing the villain 320K of my chips i suppose. the one live tournament i won i entered the final table last in chips and slowly built up so that when we were five handed all the stacks were basically even and then I got super aggressive and began buying lots of pots…i had been so snug all day because of my withered stack i felt i was going to get a lot of credit when i became real active. by the time we were four handed in that tourney i had more than half the chips in play and had been card dead. well, i think last night i recalled this success and made a conscious effort to “switch gears” and start running over a table. it didnt work

my stack steadily declined thereafter. i was absolutely effin card dead the next two and a half hours, i think i got nine deuce about 8 times lol. the final table was particularly frustrating as I saw the two short stacks double up right away and essentially folded for an hour before shoving my last 275K at 15,000/30,000 from the hijack with q10 off and ran into AA (naturally!). the good news is that i got a few more dollars in my bankroll and i know with great certainty that i am a much better player than i was a year ago but i do wish i could have kept my foot off the pedal this one time. all feedback welcome…