I’ve written about how barren the schedule at individual MTT festivals used to be: Once upon a time, if you got knocked out of a tournament, you could do things like get dinner off property or sightsee or sleep. Now, no matter what stakes you play or what circuit you are playing on, if you bust a tournament, you can probably re-enter it, and if and re-entry is closed, there will be another tournament in your price range starting soon. This makes each poker stop relentless; even if you do something like four-bullet a $100k, by the time you’ve gone to your room to wash off your loser stench and eat some food, a $50k turbo is about to have cards in the air.
Overall, this is a welcome change; with no offense to the Cypriot people or their country, I am not travelling to Cyprus three times a year to sightsee. I am going there to play cards, and I like that there is non-stop action. I am also not legally bound to re-enter tournaments as soon as possible just because concepts like “skipping tournaments” or “registering in level 3” are foreign to me— they don’t have to be. The constant treadmill of entering and re-entering tournaments can have a numbing effect; you are always playing, so why does any one tournament matter?
The flip side of this is, back in the old days, no matter how small a tournament was, it was your entire day. I had days as a 21-year-old where I played WSOP $1ks that felt like the most important tournament in the world to me, because if I busted, I would have nothing to do. In those days, I engaged in some behavior that, in tying with this week’s Halloween theme, I look back at in horror. I would complain that it had been “two weeks since I flopped a set” or “three days since I had AA.” Well, this tournament in Cyprus might represent some sort of monkey’s-paw situation to punish the complaints I made 15 years ago. “You haven’t flopped enough sets? What if you flopped all of the sets?” To bust three bullets and lose over 500bbs, you usually need to make some good hands, and today is the first of several hands in this tournament where I got my wish and flopped a set, only to lose most or all of my chips on ugly boards.
2022 Triton Cyprus $100k NLH Main Event
(500/1k/1k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack
It folds to me (56.5k) in the HJ with 2♠️2♥️, I make it 2.5k, Santhosh Suvarna (388k) calls on the button and Victor Kudinov (165k) calls in the BB.
Flop (9k) A♥️4♥️2♣️: Kudinov checks, I check, Santhosh checks
Turn (9k) 5♥️: Kudinov checks, I bet 3k, Santosh raises to 11k, I call.
River (31k) 8♠️: I check, Santhosh puts me all-in for 43k, I call and lose to 3♠️3♥️
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