We had 3 players missing so 10 total this week. Heck was player #5 at our table but was going to be 30 minutes late. Chivers must have taken a few tips from my short-handed strategy and was preflop raising and postflop raising like a bat outta hell. I only assume he was getting smacked by the deck but by the time I wanted to do something about it I had folded myself down to about 5700, starting with 8K at 25-50. Finally, after 2 levels, Heck showed up mid-way into 100-200 no antes, level 3. 2 orbits or so go by and Heck "continues" his pre-to-showing-up tight nature, playing 2 hands but making Chivers pay him off, building his stack back to a slightly above healthy almost starting stack. I was also able to put together a string of hands to put me to just below starting stack
Heck's 3rd hand of the night went like this:
So we're at 100-200 with 25 ante, 5-handed(10 players, 5+5) and I'm(7500K stack) under the gun and I look down at AKoff so I raise it up to 550, folds around to Heck in the BB(next to me) and he makes it 1100. I 4-bet it to 2500 and Heck calls. Flop comes out A-8-4 rainbow and Heck bets 3500, I shove and he insta-calls, flipping over A-Q, no help for him and he was crippled to about 1000 in chips. I was sitting on a nice stack of 15K now, Chivers back to about 9K, Chris at about 7K+ and Jaime down to about 5500 and Heck at 1100. The next hand I thought for sure Heck would shove anything hoping to take my BB but he only called, I raised with K-10 and he folded. Next hand he went all-in and Jaime and I both called, her in the BB, me in the SB. I had K-6off and the flop came A-5-3, I checked, Jaime bet 1500 and I folded, she flipped over Q-9 and Heck had J-8 or something insignificant that never improved and he was first out. Now we play with 2 tables up until top 8 so we're immediately hand for hand, which I think lasted for probably close to an hour(it was longer, but we took a super long pizza break). Looking around at my table it appeared to me that Jaime would probably be the final table bubble as she was sitting around 20 BBs with the rest of us at least double that. I attempted to bleed her a little bit but she played more aggressively than I was comfortable with and I just ended up increasing her stack and in turn dropping my stack from 15K to about 11K. About this time, Jon at the other table was the final table bubble soon after the pizza break.
Final Table:
At the head of the table(not necessarily seat 1...)was Chivers with me to his left, then Terri, Shae, Jaime, Sean, Jake and Chris to Chivers' immediate right.
Jake had a pretty large stack and Shae was probably in 2nd place. I had dispersed a lot of my above average stack from Heck to Jaime in the last couple hands prior to the final table. I pretty much sat out of the final table until after a few KOs. I believe Terri was the first one KOd. She was pretty card-dead from what I witnessed. She was just about forced to go all-in with less than a blind, K-2 suited and a small prayer.(Update: Sean was first at the FT knocked out, then Terri soon after)
I was actually getting a little low and was able to 3 and 4-bet shove a few preflop pots to take them down. This added up after a little while and I found myself a decent sized stack after a few more KOs. By the time we got to top 4 I had amassed a top 2 stack and was able to take a large chunk from Jake and he was knocked out soon after. Jaime didn't last very long at top 3 and Chivers and I had massive stacks comparable to the blinds going into heads up. Our battle lasted over an hour, which should break the record as longest heads-up battle of the season but in the end my AK was able to hold up against his K-10 and I accomplished my 3rd win of the season.
So with game 6 in the books, I've accomplished 3 wins, 5 cashes, not necessarily Greg Raymor-on-HPT-escue, but not too shabby eh? It should be good enough for player of the year honors :-) and we still have 1 game before the finale left this weekend!
