Congratulations to my backers - you're sort of in profit!
I made 18th place in tonights (by which of course I actually mean last night's - Thursday 26th - because of the time difference) $540 tournament in the Orleans Open, scooping a whopping $945 prize. After a $25 tip (a little tight, but with 4% already withheld from the prize pool for dealers, I wasn't going to go overboard) that's $9.20 coming back to you for each 1% share.
Plus, as I've only paid $870 in buy-ins so far, that's an overall profit from the two events I've played so far. $50 in total, so fifty cents for each share! Ship it!
It could have been so much sweeter had just one of three potentially huge hands won for me. After a massive pot just before the dinner break I was up to over $27k in chips, with the average at about $12k. I then lost 3 big pots; with a nut flush and gutshot straight draw that didn't get there against two players all-in, and with AK losing twice against shorter stacks all in pre-flop - AQ and T3 if you must know. Any one of those pots would have put me in much better shape than the $6k I ended up when we were 3 off the money.
I don't really know how, but I pulled off a survival miracle with blinds at $600/$1200 with a $200 ante, after deciding that it was probably better to try to creep into money (as 10th to 18th place all paid the same) than gamble it up and go broke on or near the bubble. After nobody was eliminated for what seemed like a week, I would have been all in on the big blind the very next hand when two players went broke at the same time - including one from my table. I thank them very much for paying no attention whatsoever to my stack size.
So it's not a spectacular result, but it's a start. Bring on the limit tournament!
