Finally!

...Took home a nice win and ~$300 in the spring championship freeroll of one of my leagues last night. Of the live tourneys I play, this was probably one of the deepest stacked and slowest structure tourneys I've played... and that played no small role in my being able to manage the win.

I won't bore you with more than the minimum details... but the slower structure and deep stacks allowed me to wait out a long run of horrible starting hands and several big aces that managed to completely miss the flop. I made the final table with an average stack, and lost an interesting pot:

Player to my right has an Ace exposed on the deal... normally an exposed card results in a misdeal or replacement, but for whatever reason this player was allowed to opt to keep the card, which was fine by me as I now have some key information about his hand. He raises. I look down to find AKo, and I reraise enough to set him just about all in. I know he has an Ace, and it's likely I have him dominated. He reraises all in, I auto-call, and he flips AA. Pretty big hit, and very unlikely outcome.

The rest of the final table was rather fortunate for me, as I won two key races with small/middle pairs, once to knock out a smallish stack, and once to cripple a big stack doubling me up to become the chip leader. I find aces after another smallish but alive stack pushes with KQo and they hold up. I call from the SB with 98o, and flop a house, eliminating another smallish stack with a check-call on the flop and calling his straight-draw all-in on the turn. I then hesitantly called a raise with ATo out of position against another big stack... keeping in mind the whole time that I really want to avoid a big confrontation here... flop comes ten high, and for whatever reason at the time I check top pair, mostly fearing that I'm against an unlikely-but-potentially-devastating overpair. When he pushes all in, I immediately call almost certain that with an overpair I would have recieved a large value bet, and not an all in. Top pair holds up against pocket sixes, and I'm sitting on a dominating stack.

I even snuck in a blind steal from the button with The Hammer! (and showed)

Finally, we get to heads up, and both trade some chips swinging from 2:1, to 1:2, and back to 2:1 actually on two big stone-cold bluffs, one from each of us. In the end, ATo vs A9o all in preflop finished off the tourney.

Things definitely need to swing in your favor a few times to win a tourney like this, and as someone who used to feel like I could never win a race, doing so a few times was refreshing. It's also nice to have the stack to actually gamble with a few coin flips. Everyone looks brilliant when they win, but I'm also pretty comfortable and content with my live tourney play lately... I do what I have to do to survive early, and get more agressive/willing to gamble in decent spots as the tourney progresses.

There's a saying I used to prescribe to when I was hammering the SNG's, that I think I lost focus on for a period perhaps playing too tight too late into tourneys, but have recently been applying again:

Start a tournament like a rock, and end it like a kamikaze.

Properly applied, that's about right.

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SCP championship freeroll tonight, expect tales of my domination tomorrow.