How to Lose $1100 in Thirty Minutes

Saturday was the poker celebration of the one year anniversary of Running Aces, and the casino hosted an $1100 event that drew seventy-three buy-ins. My success recently had me pretty confident I'd contend for what I assumed would be close to a $20k first prize. Add to that my intent to improve my third-place standing in the Deep Stack Player of the Year Standings, the winner of which wins a place in the 2010 WSOP Main Event, and I surrendered the entry fee without blinking.There are a couple strategies to choose from for the start of a big tournament like this (deep stack, 20,000 starting chips). Either play extremely tightly and hope for monster hands or push the pace and create a loose table image to use to trap people. I decided to let the table help determine which I would choose. As I walked to my starting table, I noticed a lot of the better players from Canterbury were there, as expected. I started on a table I knew would be broken quickly, and given that, I should have ...