I'd wiped the slate clean on my poker results spreadsheets on 1st Jan. Things didn't go exactly to plan with me playing a pretty random collection of tournaments and running quite cold indeed. This one was random too - it was just whatever was starting after I managed to get online from my hotel in King's Cross.
PokerStars Tournament #40451369, No Limit Hold'em
Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00
1101 players
You finished the tournament in 7th place.
A $363.34 award has been credited to your Real Money account.
It all went my way early on, getting some stupidly easy payoffs every time I hit a hand and I then managed to maintain and stay in the top pretty much all the way. This was a 10 minute level tournament - not quite a speed game, but faster than usual and by the end the monster chip leader only had 20 big blinds in his stack. I ended up busting after I pushed with KJs and ran into an eager caller with AJ in the blind.
I was deliberately not looking at my results spreadsheet to see how much I had to win to get back even for the year, or I'd probably have played much weaker and tried to limp into as big a payoff as possible, whilst never standing a chance of winning the thing. This is a very good payoff for a $10 tournament and three hours work (although, of course, first place was over 2 grand) but it still doesn't quite get me out of the hole. Nevertheless, I'm pretty darn pleased with the result, and in terms of performance against a large field, this is probably my best MTT result ever. Certainly my best result on Stars.
