I took down my first tourney in a while last night. Small crowd for the Tuesday weekly game (ten-handed, one table). I ran well early and took advantage of the super-loose play that occurs when stacks are deep.
About 90 minutes in, my nemesis shows up. Yes, I have a nemesis in this group. He's a super-aggro player who used to just shovel chips into other stacks when he started playing with us, but has improved significantly. He's extremly aggro, somewhat indifferent to position, very sticky with TP, and will usually fold to aggression when he misses completely. He loves to double me up in cash games when I can afford to be more patient, but in a somewhat turbo 4-hour tourney structure, it's hard to do much against him without the goods. He has run like God against me and most of the rest of the group the past few months.
Shortly after he shows up, I give him a chunk of my stack with flopped MPTK vs TPNK on a fairly dry board. He then stacks up like crazy as other players call his preflop raises with ATC, whiff the flop, then fold to his 100% cbets.
Eventually the goods come. In the span of five hands, I pick up AA, KK and QQ. All three hold up, and I get most of his stack. Another player finishes him off, and I'm left with three fit-or-fold players who don't adjust well in late game play. We play four-handed for quite a while, and I chip away at everybody until getting heads up with the best of the three and having roughly even stacks. Chips went back and forth until he called off most of his stack chasing a draw, then a couple hands later it was over.
No live stack shots unfortunately, but we played with my Caribbean Poker Classic set. Most of these chips are on indefinite loan to the regular host of this group, but I still have a few here:
