16th of 301

Last night I played in another medium-field tournament, still of a small buy-in ($5, with 1 rebuy and 1 add-on; I didn't have to rebuy, but I did the add-on), but with 301 players, 1st place got up to about $750 so that's certainly a nice prize for a $10 investment.

Things were going pretty well, and I got all the way down to the final two tables without much mishap. Then comes one hand, when I'm sitting at about 50,000 chips (just below average at this point): a short-stack moves all-in for about 12,000, one of the bigger stacks re-raises to 20,000 and I'm sitting in the small-blind with pocket kings. I move all-in, everyone else folds and the big stack calls. He's holding AQ, spikes an A on the flop and I'm out in 16th.

Bummer because if I win this pot, I'm up to like 120,000 chips (which would have been about 2nd in chip standings) and would have an excellent chance of making it to the final table and a shot at the 1st place prize.

Did I play it wrong? No way -- I did worry for a split second about the big stack having pocket aces, but that's such a small part of his range; he could be isolating the short stack with anything down to like a medium pocket pair. So I'm definitely not folding. But... could I just call and re-evaluate on the flop? Not with our stack sizes, I don't think. If I just call, there's now 36,000 in the main pot and 16,000 in the side-pot. Then with about 30,000 left in my stack, basically my only move on the flop is an all-in (or a fold). So... I could shove any flop that doesn't have an ace, but what good does that do? If he had a smaller pocket pair than kings, he's probably gonna fold unless he hit a set. And I wouldn't even know if an ace on the flop was a problem for me or not, so this just puts me in all sorts of trouble.

As played, I got called by an inferior hand which is exactly what you want, so definitely by that standard I did the right thing. Unfortunately, it just didn't go my way here.

For 16th place, I won a relatively meaningless prize of $22.73. However, it IS encouraging to continue to go deep in these medium-sized tournaments, so I'm happy about it from that standpoint.