I've found that there are two distinct ways in which these tournaments start out: 1) Tournament starts in a normal way, with normal players, and normal plays. 2) Tournament starts out where every hand is raised, re-raised, capped on every street until a few players bust out.

Tonight's tournament was the latter -- you were playing for 1/4 of your chips for every hand you wanted to play. So the stacks grow large, and the bad beats are absolutely horrendous. And yet, this is what I was stuck with for the first part of the tournament.

After taking some horrendous beats, I finally got pissed and started doing it myself -- just to get some revenge and to put myself out of my own misery. I was finally all-in with a horrible hand (3345) when I flopped a full house and more than quadrupled up. Any time when you quintuple up, you'd be surprised how your pain is easily abated. Now I had enough chips to fight, and that's exactly what I decided to do.

Instead of playing their game, I started playing my game. Good reads, good calls, and good plays. Throughout the tournament, my stack naturally fluxuated. But by the time we made it into the money, I was one of the top three chip leaders, and never looked back.

Throughout the final table, I was the predominant chip leader...but by the time you get head's up...anything can happen. I had an 8:1 chip lead advantage at the time. But as fate would have it, my opponent scooped a few monster pots to even it up. In my final hand, I had a nut flush draw, two pair, and my opponent had a straight. Neither hand of mine hit, and that was the end of my tournament.

After playing the Bay-101 Open and getting bad beat to heck, I finally got my revenge. My revenge didn't wait for a week, or even a day...it came that very night. Second place out of 144 players demonstrates what could have been in the 120-person Bay-101 Open, had the cards and luck gone my way.