3rd place finish in $55 buy in 54 man tournament

Over at FullTilt I decided to play a $55 buyin 54 man 6-man table sitngo with doublestacks. We ended up at the final table in about 3 hours, so this tourament gave a huge amount of play for the buyin (similar to the $22 buyins I described in my previous blog). I'll admit it took some luck to get there but I did manage to play fairly well on top. I played almost 400 hands and never once got aces or kings and had queens once and jacks once. I did manage to crack a pair of queens with T3 in a blind vs blind battle that scooted me into the money instead of leaving in 7th place. The tournament payed 6 places and there were 7-9 players for a good 45 minutes before the final table and $ started. It was basically an all in fest for the short stacks of which I was one at this time. In the final table I managed a couple of double ups when I raised PF and got all in on the flop with top pair with a good kicker that held up. Down at the final 3 I almost had 3/4 of the chips in play. We had a huge preflop all in race where I had AQ and my opponent had JJ. The flop came AK3 so I was almost jumping out of my chair. My hopes were dashed when a J fell on the turn and a blank on the river. I still had plenty of chips left but slowly ground down as I lost hand after hand. I never let up though and kept raising pots in position with basically garbage since that is what I was getting. A few hands in a row my opponent managed to flop something so I got down to about 10 big blinds and went all in with KJ only to run into AJ and bounce.

I'm really looking forward to some live play though in Vegas. I hope to improve on my observation skills which Phil Hellmuth says is 70 percent of live poker. Some previous coworkers, Andrew, Scott, and Mark, are all heading to Vegas as well so it will be great to see them again since it has been a few months.