Early Day, Late Night
2007-08-13 11:29:36
By: Gene Bromberg
As we often do during our $200,000 Sunday Guaranteed Tournaments, several of our Team UltimateBet pros played with bounties on their heads. Knock out one of our big-name players and you win your buy-in back. A bounty adds a little extra dynamic to the table--you might mix it up with a poker player if you know taking him out means you'll be freerolling.
Last night's event showed that locking horns with our UB pros can be a hit-or-miss proposition. Two of our pros--Mark "P0ker H0" Kroon and Gary "debo34" DiBernardi went out very early indeed, finishing in 926th and 928th place respectively. Sometimes players get bounty-crazed and will go to war with any two cards. And sometimes those players collect the scalp and double up.
And, sometimes, the pro doubles up, and keeps doubling up, and makes it deep into the pokertournament. Which is what Jim "KrazyKanuck" Worth and Shawn Rice did last night. Shawn finished in 11th place, bubbling just short of the final table and taking home $1,600. But KrazyKanuck made the final table and worked his way to the final six, before he and his short-stack took a stand with 9-10 against the pocket Queens of bearbeer.
The next poker player out was the alphabetically-challenged 135565, and then something strange happened. Two of the four remaining players--jw1700 and bearbeer--were timed out of the tournament. Often this means that there's some kind of connection problem, but it usually resolves itself in a few minutes, and it's odd that it happened to two players at once. Bearbeer held the chip lead and while his extended absence whittled down his stack, he wasn't in serious danger. That wasn't the case with jw1700, who never returned to play and was blinded out in fourth place.
During this time Balla-B13 took advantage by raising Scrooge Mcduc on every hand. Scrooge fought back by re-raising all-in a few times to slow Balla-B13 down, but he still got the worst of it as both players to his left weren't there to defend their blinds. When jw1700 was eliminated, bearbeer suddenly returned, and without anyone commenting on the strange circumstances, three-handed play began.
Scrooge Mcduc was down to around 450K when he raised before the flop and was re-raised by bearbeer. He moved all-in with pocket Eights...and found that he'd run into bearbeer's pocket Aces. The bullets held up and beerbear took a bit more than a 2-1 chip lead into heads-up play.
Balla-B13 was the aggressor when he was essentially heads-up against Scrooge Mcduck, and he did the same here. He kept re-stealing when bearbeer raised and quickly worked brought the match back to level. He kept his foot on the accelerator, building up a 2-1 lead of his own, when the final hand went down. About 20 minutes into heads-up play bearbeer raised and, once again, Balla-B13 re-raised. Bearbeer moved all-in with pocket Sevens but Balla-B13 had him crushed with pocket Queens. The board brought no help and Balla-B13 won the poker tournament and the $45,000 first-prize, while bearbeer finished as our runner-up and collected a pretty balla $26,500.
; "finalhand8-12")
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