WSOP $1500 shorthanded

I must say, shorthanded is soooooooooooooooooooooo much better than longhanded and I think that gets magnified even more when it comes to live poker. You get to play so many more hands because each hand doesn't take 3 minutes like it does at a longhanded table and because each player is forced to play so many more hands it really increases the edge that good players have against their less-skilled opponents.

My first table started with Ted Lawson on it and other than him it was a real cakewalk. A few old guys and one really young guy were playing incredibly passive and not surprisingly all 3 of them donked off their chips early in the tournament. They were then replaced by better players and the table became a little tougher but luckily it was broken and I was moved to a new table. Again, people were not able to make the proper adjustments to shorthanded and ended up folding way too much, meaning stealing blinds and antes became almost like stealing candy from a baby.

At this point I had around 6k (3k starting stack) when I lost half my stack with an overpair vs flush draw situation. Still having 3k with blinds of 100/200/25, Kevin "Belowabove" Saul raised to 600 from the CO (he had been raising between 70-80% of his hands) and I find 6d4d in my BB. The combination of my hand's equity, my perfect resteal stack size and Kevin's tremendously large hand range I decided to push. He thought for about a minute and called with A9o. The flop was TT7, turn 3, river 4 and I doubled up.

Once again I was moved and was able to build up to 11k without a showdown. After getting played back at a few times I had around 9k when the following hand went down: Blinds 150/300/25, button openlimps for 300, crazy chatterbox in the SB makes it 950 and I make it 2950 from the BB with QQ. Button folds and crazy guy thinks for a while and calls. At this point I have him on something like TT or JJ with the slight possibility that he's slowplaying something even bigger. The flop comes down K62 rainbow and he checks. At this point I have just around a potsize bet left but don't think I'm ever getting called by worse, so I decide to check behind for pot control / to be able to catch a bluff on a later street. The turn is another K which is a pretty good card for me. At this point he bets 3200, almost exactly half my stack. There's no real difference in me shoving or calling here, so I elect to call because there's no real danger of giving off a freecard and maybe I can get him to bluff off his last barrel on the river if he's crazy enough. The river is a 9 and he shoves, I snapcall, he shows KTo ftw.

Today is the $5k shootout which I will most likely be playing. Should be a good tournament. Ciao!