Tactical errors....

I played a few of the 180 man $20 SNG's on Stars last night. In one of them I was sitting near average before I made a huge hand, nearly tripling up and catapaulting myself near the chip lead.

The situation was I had about 2250 in the 50/100 blind level, and raised to 300 with QQ. The button called, and the SB called. Flop came Qc5c4x, and I opted for the check, hoping that the button, who only had 1K left, would shove. The button obliged, and then the SB flat called the 1K. I obviously shoved at this point with the SB calling. The button had Tc7c, and the SB had Ac2c....so I was dodging the other 7 clubs, and the 4 3's. They missed and suddenly I was up to around 6K. From there it was very smooth sailing until the final 3 tables, I started building a stack with limited resistance, and took down a ton of pots either with pre-flop raises or re-raises, or flop continuation bets. I eventually built my stack up to about 38K, when the average was 12K.

Then things started going wrong. It began with AJ < AK on an ace high flop to a shorter stack, and that started a run of my pre-flop raises being the only ones that were met with resistance. I wasn't opening an unreasonable amount of pots at this point, but whenever I did I was being met by a call or raise...then an unsatisfactory flop.

Finally, I re-raised a MP raise with AQ, only to run into AK...board ran out A54AQ for me to hit the miracle 3 outer, and I was back in business with 25K in chips. I hovered in that general vicinity up to the final table, which I reached in 5th position. I treaded water for a while until I reached the critical final decision.

This hand should be prefaced by the fact that I had to work this morning, and this tourney had gone over one hour later than I planned on playing, so I was less than 5 hours from my wake-up call. I had Ac6c, and commented to myself that I would re-pop the frequent raiser all-in if he opened. Sure enough he opened in EP to 3K (600/1200 blinds)...he had been opening a ton of pots, but almost all of them were full 3X raises. I even commented that this was a smaller than normal raise, but instead of stopping myself, I decided to shove, and of course ran into a real hand in JJ, even though my intuition expected it. Unfortunately I didn't get lucky and I was eliminated in a disappointing 7th place, for a paltry $120...when first was over $1k.

It just goes to show that you need to maintain focus at all times in order to make a big score.