Donkarama Win!

After a 30-minute heads up battle with "Dontknow," I emerged victorious over 25 fellow donks. Amazingly, I did it on only the first buy-in and pre-game add-on. My first table was amazing, with Hoy to my immediate left, Jordan two to my left, 23 Skidoo three to my left,J-Goat FOUR to my left, and a few other familiar faces.

Jordan started off on a heater, jumping up to 15k or so within the first few orbits. I won a monster 3-way pot that Jordan said he would have felt bad if he won. That put me past the 10k mark fairly early, and I never dipped below 10k for the rest of the night.

Soon after the big 3-way pot, Hoy, the gracious donor that he is, vowed he was going all-in the next five hands. He stayed true to his words, and I picked up a couple more nice pots.

The whole table was talking, everything from the Brandi Ha... Qualong ?Yei? porno ravaging the 2+2 forums (see Iggy), to the super bowl and a variety of other topics. Astin got moved to the table sometime after the first break, and I wanted to raise preflop with my Queens, but he had to have aces or kings, so I just called, with 23Skidoo in the BB joining us. Skidoo then bet out on the all-unders, connected flop. Astin made the scary smooth-call, and I knew I would lose the hand, so I gave it up. Turn ended up filling Astin's OESD, and 23Skidoo was sent to the rail.

It was fun to have a talkative table after playing against strangers in the pits of online poker for the last few months. I haven't had the bankroll, nor the desire, to play much poker recently, and I didn't boot up my computer until 5:56pm tonight. I saw the time and remembered reading Kat's post while I was at work today. The $1 buy-in to play with great poker players (even IF they are playing like donks), is such an awesome thing. I can't swing the $10 nightly tournies anymore, both the bankroll and time, so I salute Kat for putting this donkament together and keeping it going week-in and week-out.

So anywho, I get switched to the other table when we're down to two tables, just as Kat gets knocked out--so I don't get to play with the hostess with the mostest. Aforementioned Iggy was at the table, but not chatting. Surf, Sellthekids, Donkette and Yesterbay rounded out the table. Nothing too crazy happened, I either won some flips or got my money in ahead and my cards were holding up. Other than that, I was playing very passively. I wasn't defending my blind, wasn't getting into situations out of position, and just generally folding a ton.

Iggy seemed to be the only one picking up on my passiveness, and I continued to let him play aggressively (not sure if I could stop him if I tried). Plenty of other people tried to stop him, and got crushed. Well, he's raising all the time, he can't have good hands all the time! Then Iggy would get called and show the nuts. He continued his aggressive play well into the final table, and to make a long story short, we got down to four people, Iggy with around 120k, me with 60k, Dontknow with 40k and Surf with 30k.

Iggy was bullying all of us, and rightly so. Surf and Dontknow didn't want to bubble, and they were even playing tighter than I was, which is saying something! I looked Iggy up on a few hands, as he was only raising 2-3x BB. I got lucky, and won a large pot with a turned nut-flush, which Iggy was able to get away from with 80k chips already in the pot. A few hands later I knocked out Iggy with another flush (I think?).

The game quickly changed for me, going from passive bubble play to big chip leader with two short stacks. I began bullying, and min-raises seemed to do the trick. I'd raise, and they would both fold. I offered a chop, with me getting 1st place money and them sharing 2nd and 3rd money, but Surf politely declined. The next hand Dontknow knocked him out, and we were down to two. The heads up match started with me being a 190k-50k or so chip advantage. Heads up lasted forever, and both of us weren't willing to go to war without being in the lead. One of our only observers, Donkette, finally bowed out about 15 minutes into the heads up match, and I think she lasted the longest of any observers. It must have been boring as sin to watch, but actually seeing the cards and playing the match was a blast. Much like my strategy against Iggy when we were at four players, Dontknow played very passively and let my min-raises take his BB on a fairly consistent basis. I min-raised nearly every time from the button, and took down the pot pre-flop about 40% of the time. It made sense for me to keep this up, and as the blinds increased, I knew I would eventually prevail... assuming some big cooler hands didn't come up...

Luckily, only one cooler happened, where Dontknow's top pair tripped up after getting all the money in on the flop to my overpair. I still held the chiplead, and continued to grind it out. Thanks to all the rebuys, the two of us had PLENTY of room to play, so it was fun to get into a long heads up match. I grinded him back down to around 40k or so, and the next time he got all his chips into the middle, he was drawing dead by the river, which always feels great.

I ended up turning $3 into $107, for a nice $104 Friday night profit--nearly tripling my bankroll at Full Tilt, woot!

Thanks again to Kat for the tourney, and starting my Super Bowl weekend off on the right foot!