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Well, I busted late on Day One. It was one of those tournaments where I didn’t have any cards. During the eleven hours I played, here’s how often I had hands from the range 77+, AQ+
AA: 1 (won the blinds)
KK: 0
QQ: 1 (folded on the five-high flop and was shown AA)
JJ: 1 (fourth hand of the tournament, won the blinds and one limp)
TT: 1 (second hand of the tournament, folded on a queen-high flop)
99: 0
88: 1 (folded preflop to Jeff King’s raise; he showed JJ)
77: 0
AK: 1
AQ: 3 (one of which was the only decent pot I won)

So you can see I didn’t really have many good hands. A possibly bigger problem was that I didn’t even get playable hands. I don’t need one of the above premiums to play. I’ll often take a suited one-gapper, or a suited ace, or two big cards, or some 40-50% of my hands in late position. I couldn’t even find trash like that to play. It got to the point where it folded to me on the button and I would say to myself, “yes, seven-five offsuit! I can finally open!” or “Ooooh, 95s, this is a solid spot!”

As is typical when this card-dead, I didn’t lose too many big pots. I mostly got ground down by the rising blinds and antes and eventually committed to top pair with seventeen blinds left in my stack. My opponent gave a speech about how he didn’t think he could fold, and then said he was “not that big.” he had KQ on a queen-high board, and I estimate he had about 75% equity against my short-stack range. I must’ve looked as though I was playing super-tight.

Oh well, today was close to an impossible task with the combination of the cards I had and the cards I ran into. I was somewhat lucky to stay alive as long as I did. Mohegan next!