LAPC Day Two: Decent Luck

I arrived at a table with Todd Brunson and Joe Pelton on my right, BodogAri (with a gargantuan stack), and online foes TheCzar and RichANDSmooth to my left. Brunson busted quickly and got replaced by the slippery tourney vet Johan Storakers. No one made it through the day except for Ari and myself.

On the fourth hand of the day I looked down at the sweet sight of pocket kings and made a normal raise. It looked like I wouldn't get any action but the big blind came along for the ride, then checkraised me all in on a J87 flop. I called, held on against his pocket nines, and then basically cruised up to 91,500 chips where I finished the day. BodogAri was to my direct left all day, playing a Jamie Gold like-game. I decided to play pretty tight since he was calling a ton of raises, hitting a lot of monsters, and generally playing well. Luckily I got some action with my good hands and not too much adversity with my mediocre ones. There were also no coolers, bad beats, or misclicks.

I was scanning the chip counts looking at my table draw for tomorrow. Things looked pretty good.



PHAN LOI V 140,700 6 1
JENKINS RONALD 70,100 6 2
BACH DAVID 133,000 6 3
MEDINA CUITZEMAN 30,000 6 4
JOHNSON BENJAMIN 115,500 6 5
FULLER THOMAS 91,500 6 7
GOOTT ARI 81,800 6 8
FERNANDEZ JACOBO 169,100 6 9

Some good players, certainly, but no superstars, which is rare at this point of the tournament. Then I got to the top of the list:

TRAN JC 543,700 6 6

Yikes. The chip leader, and one of the top five tournament players in the world. To be honest, I'm really looking forward to it. I've been wanting to play with him for a while, since he has the best tournament results of anyone over the last six months. I imagine he'll be raising most of the time it is folded to him, so I'll have to decide between

1) reraising
2) calling and trying to play flops against him
3) getting the hell out of the way

I've been all in and called once this tournament, with the guy having six outs. Ari thought about making a huge call against me on a board of A5h3h where I made an obvious-draw shove with 7h4h not really caring if he called or folded, other than that life has been pretty smooth. If the pattern continues tomorrow's blog entry will be titled "LAPC Day Three: Good Luck".

The Fish hit a hand or two vs William Lin and is up to 161k.