Bought in directly because I'm a high roller, and I've been itching to play it lately. Plus I won a $60 turbo for 250, so that pretty much covered the buyin for it and I managed to justify dropping 215 on a tournament I have very little chance of cashing in. Not had very good experiences in this thing in the past. A few 5-outers top pair vs. second pair stuff, had AA vs smaller pairs twice which beat me, the one time I went reasonably deep, had second biggest stack at the table with KK, bigstack had AA. Maybe today will be different, I thought. Maybe.

Went well to start, no major pots really, just slowly built the stack up. Raise in LP with AJ, flop ace, bet flop/turn/check behind river, opponent shows busted flush draw, I weeeen. UTG minraise, two callers, I call on the button with JTs, flop QJ6, UTG bets about 1/3 pot, one caller, I peel one off, turn nothing, UTG checks, caller bets same amount as flop, I suppose I could raise there because this entire hand has been super weak so far, but I just call as does UTG. River another baby, checked to me, probably should've bet here for value but decided to show it down. Jacks goot, I take a nice pot. BB with KK, button raises, SB pushes for about 7000 with blinds 200/400, I poosh over the top, button folds SB shows 99, huzzah. Finally, get aces in MP, UTG pushes for about 12BB, I decide to push over the top, about 15k, he's got 9T or some junk, flop K9K, turn 9, river A, zing. By first break I had about 20k or so, avg was maybe 14k, so doing alright.

Not much happened after first break until busto. Table been pretty soft, mostly just blind stealing, not many big confrontations. About 24k, sitting 450/2500 or so, blinds 600/1200, 42o in the BB, MP limps, LP limps, I check, 42T 2 spades. Lead for half pot, MP folds, LP pushes 25k into a ~4800 pot. Uhhhhh. Right. Not seen a crazy bet like this all tournament. Tank for a bit, decide unless I'm up against a limped TT I'm probably good, and just hope he doesn't have a hand like As2s. Call, turn Qc, river 3s, I cringe as I see his Js8s. Niii han surrrr. Nice critical hand for my stack not going my way, gets me damn close to top 100 in chips. Quite a silly bet by him too, but I'll take it.

At least I felt alright about buying into it directly, so maybe this could become a bit more of a regular thing. Biggest MTT buyin I had done prior to this point was 30 bucks, so quite a big leap. Being able to make a buyin in one SNG is nice too. Oh yeah, I've been dabbling in the 60 dollar turbos on Stars, up a marginal amount over the first 20 or so. Seem some truly awful play too, and given that I've played such a large large number, I can make sweeping generalizations about the overall play of these. For serious though, some pretty ugly stuff, not really feeling outclassed or anything yet at this point. So far so goot. Been hovering between 2000-3000 for a while, but not too worried about it. Having other income sort of takes the pressure off a bit, even though I wasn't playing poker as my main income stream anyways. Probably why I can justify a huge tournament buyin too, but hey as long as I'm having fun with it, right?

Until I go broke doing too many big buyin tournaments. But that won't be for a while, so let's enjoy the ride.