Fall from grace...

It was beautiful. I was making great headway in a $2 rebuy tournament, had seen pocket aces twice, and both times stacked 2 players with them. I was huge sitting in the top ten with the other chip leaders. Sitting pretty, I hung back and let natural tournament attrition take it's course
for a while until the blinds were worth my effort to steal again.

40 or so hands later, were down to the top 150 players out of a starting field of 429, and now the antes have kicked in and the blinds are of substantial enough value to protect... and to steal. The player two seats to my left had recently made a habit of stealing my big blind, as prior to this point protecting it wasn't worth the risk. I figured I would just trap them and bust them later with a real hand.

I guess I decided now that I had to learn a lesson the hard way that I should have learned the first time. And the second. And third...

On the particular hand which heralded the slow demise of my hard earned mega-stack, I saw the not so lovely, in fact terrible, seven deuce of spades. The villain, assuming that I would continue to give up my blind for a minimum raise, as I had attempted trained her (her avatar was female, anyway) to do, did just that, like clockwork. Now me being me and unable to escape the pitfalls of ego and over-confidence decide I'm going to show her a lesson, and take her down a notch with the worst of all holdem hands, the seven deuce. The amount I had to pay to try was insignificant compared to the number of chips I had amassed, so I thought this would be fun.

When I called the raise and the flop came 752, I was overjoyed that my plan was coming together so well. I had flopped 2 pairs! On the flop, I check, and the villain puts out a bet about half the size of the pot -  $350. I pause, but not for too long and re-pop her for $1100. I get a reraise to 3000.

Now this is the point where I should have set aside my personal attachment to the hand and really thought objectively about what was actually going on in the hand. I called the reraise, and by this time, the villain only has about $4500 left in her stack, the total of which was a little over a third of my own stack. Before I called that $3000, I should have realized that if I call it, I will effectively be committed to also call what was left behind, either on the turn or the river. All this I did realize when the turn came another 5, pairing the board.

As my stomach drops down to my ass, I subconsciously concede defeat, because I had assumed at some point that the villain was holding a pocket pair of some rank, probably better than 7's. Now my hand is counterfiet, and before simply checking and folding to the inevitable all in shove from my opponent, I hear two voices in my head. One is Doyle Brunson saying to me how aggression is king. The other is Phil Hellmuth telling me you can't bluff the unbluffable.

I shove all in, hoping that somehow the villain will see this as something like deuces full. Sevens full. Anything that was better than her hand. But did I really expect her to think? I don't think I did, really. CALL. The villain shows pocket queens for two pair, queens and fives. The chatbox lit up like an old Christmas tree, let me tell you!

It wasn't all downhill from there, I mean, I battled and got my stack back up to about $22K at one point, but I lost patience and tried to bluff my way back to the stack I had prior to my donktacular showing. The tournament was paying 54 places, and I took the dive at 85.

I only made 1 rebuy in the beginning of the tournament, and one add-on for a total of $6.

Bankroll = $422.51