Woo Hoo! Woo Hoo!

I won the Omaha tournament today! Woo hoo! Yee hah!

It was a fairly small tournament, about 56 players. When it was down to two of us, we each had almost exactly the same number of chips, so we split the pool between us, a bit over $1000 each.

It was an interesting and grueling tournament. It was small enough that only 7 players were in the money; if there had been 60 or more, 10 places would have paid. When it got down to twenty players, every one got real tight; it took two hours to go from 20 to 10 players. Then it was like pulling teeth weeding out players! Anytime someone found themselves all in, they won. (This is limit poker, remember). As the table slowly shrank, I found my stack dwindling; I don't think I won a single hand in between there being 10 players and there being five. My stack got to the point where I was all in on my blinds three times in a row, and luckily pulled through.

Six hours of intense play, which is way long for that tournament -- usually when they're that small they're finished by 4:30, and this one was over at 6:15. I played pretty well, kept discipline, and acted boldly at the right time.

Oh, another odd thing was that when we got to the final table, nobody had a huge stack of chips; I was chip leader with maybe one and a half times the average stack. The way the limits go up there, you can go from leader to short stack real quickly (and I did); and you can go from short stack to leader real quickly (which I did too; the joys of exponential growth.)

Yay me!