So Close .. Yet so far..

Today at 12, I played in the biggest tournament of my life. The prize pool is Guaranteed 100k by the site. That means top place gets 25,000 dollars, #2 get about 14,500 dollars and so on.. The buy-in for the tournament was 110 which I qualified through a 10 dollars satallite.

It turned out that only 707 players signed up so apparently the gaming club had to put in 30k to make the guaranteed 100k, so that always favors the players!

I played very well the entire tournament and was big stacked most of the way, I felt like I was very focused and never put my stack at risk at any time of the tournament. I cruised to the money and when there were 50 players left, I was ranked 4th. Then my table got split so I was put into a table with 3 of the top-4 stack and 2 other very healthy stacks. That is pretty bad luck considering there were still 5 tables in play and my table has so many players who could hurt me. I never got anything going at this new table and was never moved. I still managed to make it to the final 2 table before bubbling the final table at 14th..

There has to be some regrets in finishing so close to the final table and the big money, these big tournaments only pay final table lots of money and the majority goes to top-3, so to have come this close to one of the biggest finish but not to make it is rather disappointing.. Put it this way, #7 pays 3,400 which would double my ENTIRE poker bankroll at this point.. So yea..

here is a screenshot of my exit

http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~fosterg/bigpokertourny.jpg