Foxwoods Recap

After not really knowing what was going on until the last minute I ended up driving down to Foxwoods very early Monday morning to play in a $400 tournament capped at 250 entrants. I think they received 244.

The level of play was probably on part with a $30 or $50 online buy-in. There were some very competent players at my table but they were also playing straight-forward enough where I put moves on them two or three times.

With the blinds at 800/1600/200 I had around 64,000 in chips.

I had 7d8d on the button and a woman who had been playing fairly tight made it 4,800 from middle position and I elected to flat. Both blinds folded and we took a flop of 2 6 4 with two diamonds. I'm obviously not going anywhere.

With 13,800 in the middle she bets out 6,500.

I tanked for about 90 seconds before announcing a raise and made it 20,500 more on top which was putting her in an all-in or fold spot and she had zero fold equity against me. She ended up thinking for about 3 or 4 minutes before folding black tens face up and asking me to show.

I flashed my 8 of diamonds and mucked the other card which made her tell me she can''t believe I played pocket 8's that way. Yeah, me neither.

I made another move later where I got someone off top pair with no kicker when I held bottom pair and a flush draw. The player, an older guy who played very tight, hemmed and hawed and then told me I must have him outkicked before folding.

My bustout hand was very standard unfortunately. And by standard I mean I took a pretty bad beat to get knocked out just shy of the money.

With the blinds at 2500/5000/600 I had gone card dead and was stuck at 12 big blinds.

UTG, a kid with a PokerStars fleece who acted like an expert but obviously didn't play higher than $20 MTT's, limped in and UTG+1 went all in for close to 20 big blinds. The UTG+1 player had a thick cajun accent and kept saying he didn't know how to play. It wasn't an act. He was pretty bad.

I looked down at QsQh and called his-all in.

The kid with the fleece told me he was laying down a monster he limped to trap someone with "just for me" because "I don't seem like I stink".

The Cajun turned over TdAd and got runner runner diamonds to knock me out. Well played, sir.

Fleece told me he had limped with Jacks. Yeah, that's a trap hand ...

I would definitely do this tournament again - you got a 20,000 starting stack with 25 minute levels and blinds began at 25/50. Unfortunately I was dead for the first four levels but the players had no issue getting into very large pots with very suspect holdings that early on so I felt like I had a large edge over the field with my cash game background and growing MTT skill set.

So, I never ended up playing in the cash games because the tournment lasted into the evening and I didn't feel like staying overnight, but I highly recommend playing anything under a $560 buy-in at Foxwoods if you are competent because you will have an edge over the field for sure.