Donkerful Tonight

Well, it certainly came fast. Tonight is the BBT 2: Australian Boogaloo Tournament of Champions. 27 of us donks fighting it out for an $18,000 prize package to the Aussie Millions in Melbourne. Flight from LA to Melbourne. Limos to the Crown Casino, where a nice little room will be waiting for the sleeping. Wine tours, golf, nightlife, shopping... oh, and some sort of poker tournament too. Helluva prize. Did I mention you get to bring a guest?

But first - last night. I came home from a bunch of Christmas shopping gone awry and was on uber-tilt. Impossible to find items being snatched from under my nose or with jacked up prices. Places that are usually well-stocked with obscure items are now sold out. Every other item in a series EXCEPT the one I'm looking for. Hell, even the toiletries I bought on my way home were on sale today. It was one of those nights where you needed to come home and find comfort somewhere. I decided to combine poker with popcorn and hot chocolate with booze.

A $1 SnG almost instantly fixed my tilt when I pushed all-in from the SB on a minraised and multi-called pot on the first hand with 84o. This induced FOUR all-in calls (AQc, AKs, KJh, A9d), and a board of J8QKA or somesuch. Suddenly some lucky guy has 5x the starting chip stack after ONE hand. I felt better.

I also signed up for the 50-50. Donked my way to 484th or something out of 1005. An over-aggressive table early made my "good enough to see a flop" hands into chip bleeders. No way I'm calling all-ins with only an overpair to the board 4 minutes in.

And then there was The Mookie. Made about 100x better by the return of Joanne - one of the first bloggers I met before she went on her year-long hiatus from blogging and poker for various reasons. I last saw her/heard from her before last year's December gathering when I was skiing in Banff and stopped into Calgary to play some poker and meet up with the woman who strikes fear into the heart of Waffles. Welcome back Jo. Stick around for a while, will ya?

I played INCREDIBLY loose and fast last night. At one point I was seeing over 1/3rd of the flops, and settled around 29%. It was wonderfully therapeutic and fun. I decided to throw up a Hoy bet to NumbBono and folded when he min-bet the river. Lollercoasters all around as I claimed I didn't have the odds to call. I wanted to see if I could come back. I folded the next hand, and then pushed my 1 chip all-in with K8o something. Flopped an 8 that held and I quadrupled up! Two hands later I pushed again for 4 chips with Q5o. Ran smack into Pokerpeaker's aces. Q56 on the flop had me laughing. Brick on the turn, and... NO!!! A 6 on the river gives Peaker the suckout win over my and ends my massive comeback. I could have had 16 chips there! After that it's easy as the blinds would hit me and I'd be all-in twice more, and obviously would have at least 200 or so chips. Would've been sweet.

So then I played a $10 27-man SnG on Stars and went out 22nd when some donk with K9o turned a straight against my two-paired QJo. Obviously my bet and re-push on the 3-spaded board wasn't enough to scare him.

That was it for poker last night... early to bed, late to rise.

Tonight though.... tonight is the big one. The TOC. I was the last person to get a seat (Jec got the last seat, but he already had one), despite two 2nd place finishes and 5 final tables. 27 donkerrific players fighting it out for the big prize. It will be a hard-fought, hard-nosed, bloody affair. Winner-take-all. This is easiest the biggest and toughest prize ever in these blogger affairs. Al continues to impress.

It's a hell of a mix too, and even though there's some big blogger names involved, it's anyone's game to win. My strategy? Get lots of premium hands and extract maximum value without putting much effort into it. Why change what got me here, right?

Chad's got his highly scientific odds up (1:9 for me and the prediction I'll tilt the entire final table at the Aussie Millions so they just chip dump to me a day early), and VinNay has a player roundup (we're all Tier 2 except for those who aren't). Hoy's got his "Fearsome Foursome" up. My luckboxy ass is on it. Go figure. Naturally, since I've been picked to do well, I'll gigli out when my KK meets AA and AA after Fuel folds his KK pre-flop. Just read the post that got him a seat. Then again, he claimed I was drawing dead pre-flop in that hand... a 9TJQ board could have won it for me :).

Me? I make no predictions. I want 1st as badly as anyone else. Anything less will be... disappointing.

Oh, and there's the $1000 freeroll too at 9pm. Multitabling is awesome.