Aria $125

I played the Aria tournie today with Mike today, which attracted 50 runners, and I suffered more KK woe just short of a payday.

I ran my 10k stack to 25k pretty fast with my usual approach of representing whatever was the nuts in position and didn't get looked up, and also made a hero call against a young guy with top pair for an 8k pot.

I then received 2 gifts in a row. After I raised to 1800 with JQ someone decides to limp jam on me for only 1100 more with QT and I hold.

Someone then gets it in against my 3 bet when he has no fold equity and my JJ holds against 88.

Then I even manage to even eliminate Mike, who had been playing his usual steady game.

I had been raising the button when Mike was on the BB with mixed results and the next orbit I noted he had a resteal stack so decided to only raise when I was happy to call off. AQ seemed good against his perceived range of mine and I was lucky he picked up AJ to reshove on me and I held.

By the time we had 10 runners left, I had about 50k and probably in the lower half of the field so was looking for a double up.

At 1k/2k I made my standard raise to 5k with KK, and young guy shoved button just covering me. There was a delay as an older guy wanted a count as making the final table was important to him (final table 9 handed) but eventually he passed and I of course called against AQ and the river was an Ace to bust me.

Oh well - I felt I played tournies really well this trip - running up a big stack in most of them early on, but a couple of near misses meant I only broke about even.

And so the Vegas trip ends......