Wish me luck tomorrow

Above: Want to know what 216,000 in chips looks like? Check out the photo above. The gray ones are 5000 each and I had 40 of them. (Click to enlarge.)

I finished running my errands this morning and thought again about re-entering the tournament that I played in yesterday at the Horseshoe Casino. Because so many players had busted out yesterday, it seemed like there was an overlay -- similar to when an online poker site adds money to the prize pool, but this money added by the players themselves. Anyway, I talked myself into playing again, and I'm glad I did.

We played through the middle of level 14 (stopping at the exact point that the players from Friday (Day IA) did. Yesterday 20 (out of 132 entrants) made it to that point and today 28 did (out of 176). So, tomorrow at 2 p.m., they will combine the two fields and continue play. Of the 48 players left, only 36 will cash.

There are two monster stacks of more than 300,000 chips and a few in the 220,000 range. I have 216,000 and am guessing I'm around fifth or so. The players who barely cash will only win $241 or basically get their money back. First place, however, pays about $18,500, an amount worth shooting for.

Here's my major win for the day: The blinds were $3000/1500/500 and I raised to $7100 from under the gun. A guy called and the small blind peeked at his hole cards to see: ♠A ♣K. He just called. The flop was ♥A ♦K ♥6. He bet 5000 and I raised to 15,000. The other guy folded and it was back to the small blind. He didn't really give it much thought and moved all in. I called and showed ♠6 ♣6 for the flopped set. There were still two aces and two kings in the deck, but the board bricked out and I doubled up from about 110,000 to around 230,000. Life is sweet.

Photo taken by me with my iPhone.