Hey ya’ll…just wanted to collect some opinions on my bustout hand from the Bellagio 15k yesterday. I have talked about it ad nauseam, and seemingly been heavily criticized for it, but I wanted to hear from some of you…as, of course, I keep running in through my head over and over..

So, with blinds at 50k-100k (!), and an ante of 10k, I had just previously been CL (9 players left) with 3.25m in chips, but lost a race with AK vs. 77 for about 925k, and then went through the blinds, plus a few antes extra plus that, leaving me with just about 2m in chips, which is where most of the players basically were.

The situation was this: everyone folded to ElkY and me in the blinds and he brought it in, as usual, to 275k, which was slightly more than he had been bringing it in for recently. A little history first: I had ElkY on my right every time we played together during this tournament and in our history he had brought it in 100% of the time when it was folded to us in the blinds, which is obviously considerable given that stage in the tournament.

This is no exaggeration, as it was literally 100%, which was the correct strategy for him, as I had decided to let him do his thing and not get involved with garbage hands at that stage when I didn’t need to. I would say he brought it in when it folded to him on the button 85% of the time, and in the cutoff 70-75% of the time.

So, he does his thing, and I look down at K-9off and decided that this hand was too good to just let it go to him at this point, given his raising frequency, as well as his expectation that I would not play back at him whatsoever (I believe I re-raised him back roughly 4-5 times in late position in the last two days we played together).

I didn’t see him calling me too lightly here, and certainly think he would have raised me with 2-3off the same as AA there, although he seemingly had been bringing it in small with his better hands the few times I saw them. He had no reason not to keep raising with ATC, as it had to have seemed like free money to him.

I only had roughly 7 times what he brought it in for, and he had me barely covered with probably about 2.2m to my 2.0m, so even though he was basically playing for his tournament there, I was ACTUALLY playing for mine, which may be a reason to lean toward folding here.

At any rate, he thinks for about 60 seconds and calls with A-9hearts and I’m in jail and out of the tournament.

I still feel that this was the right play given all the info that I had collected over the last 2-3 days playing with him, but it was just unfortunate that he actually had a hand then…although it seems to me that given all the information he had on mine, it was still a bit of a light call.

Thoughts? Basic aggressive play? Terrible play? Let me know…

Thanks,
J