Sixth of Forty

After handing over my tickets to a co-worker who had a grandfather that had not been to a baseball game in years, I decided to head over to the local card club for their Wednesday night bounty tournament. Since the buy-in amount is so low, the first hour is un-limited re-buys. Single, Double, or for the last five minutes of the hour, Triple stacks of chips are available to help bump up the prize pool. They guy on my left did four single re-buys before giving up and going home. The cards he was playing were not that great, but he seemed to expect them to be. It took nearly four hours of folding through these twenty minute levels, with occasional large pots being won, to get down to the final ten players. I came to the final table third in chips, with about twenty thousand, and the antes were now at three hundred with the small blind at six hundred and the large blind at twelve hundred. The button started on my left and I felt good about my chances. The hand that crippled me went like this, I have ace-king in the cut-off and it is folded around to me. I raise to three thousand. The button and the small blind fold, the big blind calls. The flop comes queen-king-queen. I don't believe he has a queen as he checks, and I bet another three thousand. He raises all-in for five thousand. uh-oh, he must have a queen. I call the additional two thousand and he flips over king-queen t0 my ace-king. He flops a full house and proceeds to double up through me. The turn card came the case queen which gave me the same full house, but then he had four queens. I mocked a 'chop-chop' which got a small laugh until the new tournament director started to have the dealer start chopping the pot. I had to tell him I was kidding and to look at his four queens. It was his first time being in charge of tournaments there. The electronic board did not become active until the third level of blinds. When I finally did get knocked out in sixth place, he apologized for the way things were run. I told him he did fine under the circumstances of being left alone to run it on short notice and tipped ten percent of my winnings into the dealer bucket. An old man who never tips saw me and asked 'How come you do that?' I wasn't going to tell him that the dealers did a good job and deserved it, because he was getting a lot of bad cards before being knocked out in tenth place, so I just told him 'cause I'm silly' and left the building. Oh yeah, and I collected a bounty for knocking out one of the players with the bounty button before reaching the final table. All in all, a profitable night, whilst the Dodgers swept the Mets.