A nice score

Even though this sign at the Horseshoe Tunica reminds players that the temporary poker room is next door, only 45 runners signed up to play in the Saturday 3 p.m. $160 buy-in tournament. This is a tournament that routinely draws 100 players. I believe there was a tournament at Harrah's with a big guarantee which also siphoned off players.

We started with 12,000 in chips and five players were to be paid with first getting $2038 down to fifth-place getting $398.

Early with the blinds at 200/400/25, I limped in. A player with pocket aces raised to 1200. Because this wasn't much of a raise, another player called, so it cost me 800 more to win a pot that was already 3650 -- easy call. The flop was 10-10-3 with two hearts. It checked to the raiser, he made a continuation bet and the other guy folded. I moved all in and the guy with A-A didn't even think much before calling. I showed him ♠10 ♠8 and he looked surprised. If he had raised a little more, the third party wouldn't have called, so I wouldn't have either. Instead he put his stack in jeopardy. Greed is a terrible thing.

I don't remember many of the hands, but I chipped up nicely and made it to the final table. With seven left, a bad player made a hopeless all-in bluff and gave her chips to me (I had A-J on a board with A-J and some lower cards). We agreed to give 6th place $160 to speed up play. The other bad player busted soon, and serious play started.

It seemed to go on forever. We took a scheduled 10-minute break, and when we returned, a guy had used an app on his phone to work out a chop. The chip-stacks were 54K, 65K, 105K, 138K and 176K. They took out five times fifth-place money and divided the rest of the prize pool based on the percentage of chips each player had left. I've heard this method short-changes the shorter stacks, but I didn't care because I was the one with 176K. It was almost 11 p.m. and players were tired so all agreed. That gave $1400 to that wonderful guy we call MOJO (moi) which worked for me.

Photo taken with my phone.