Round 2: The Wild Card

Today we’ll hear from The Wild Card, a Business Analyst originally from Canton, MA. When this guest poster first came to SIG, she couldn’t properly shuffle a deck of cards. Through over two years of practice, she’s not only one of our players, but also a dealer in the tournament!

It was fun to hit the tables again after being out of practice for some time. Although it’s been a while since I’ve played, the core principles SIG has taught me came back, and with that and some good luck I managed to make it to Round 2 with a pretty good stack. I didn’t get into too many interesting hands in Round 2, because I was generally playing tight starting hands (A10 or better), and ended up being dealt only 2-3 of them all night. I picked up some chips with a KK, and collected some blinds with KQ, but that was pretty much it. That’s not to say that there wasn’t action at our table! During the first half of the night, I think we saw 9 of the tournament knockouts…it felt like we had a constant rotation of players! One hand that I particularly enjoyed watching happened about halfway through the round. Chip Leader at the table bets (stack ~12k), Late Position (stack ~6-7k) raises, CL shoves, LP thinks for a few minutes (building the drama, of course) then calls with QQ. The CL shove was with A9. I was initially surprised QQ called because I figured the CL didn’t really need to shove there and only would do so with better (AA, KK, AK), but after talking to a few people at the table, realized that CL would certainly shove with worse if he thinks he’s getting better hand to fold, which he very nearly did. Even so, a brave play by LP, who came out of Round 2 as the overall chip leader.