DUBLIN BELLYBUSTERS

Sunday, October 4th, 2009: The Full Tilt Espana Series - Barcelona Event, Day 3 (Evening)
The Tournament Director called a 10 minute recess before heads-up play, allowing me the opportunity to do some high-fiving and fist-bumping with my railcrew. It was 1.30am and they had tirelessly cheered me on for over 10 hours. I took a moment to size up the situation and believing I had a decent edge over my opponent, I decided on a small-ball heads-up approach. I had almost 60 Big Blinds in my stack, so, again credit to the tournament structure, there was plenty of room for poker.

After some brief ‘horse and pony’ media stuff, we shook hands and took our seats to do battle. 45 minutes in and my small-ball strategy seemed to be doing the job. We had contested no big pots yet and I had Cesar down to 800K. Feeling he needed to throw caution to the wind, he turned up the aggression pre-flop. This approach worked better for him as he rallied back to 1.4 million before the following hand.

Hand 13 - Day 3, Blinds 20000/40000, 2.6M
I raised to 80K (my standard play had been to min-raise my button) with the A10 of spades and Cesar made it 250K. I called. The flop came 2-4-5 with two spades. Cesar fired 400K and I went all-in. He folded, leaving himself with just 750K.

Four hands later, the blinds went up and I looked down at pocket 10s. I made it 120K and he raised it to 350K. I shipped it and he cursed himself, throwing J7 into the muck face-up. He was rattled and with only 12 Big Blinds to my 88, I smelled blood.