Tournament Co-Co-Co-Co-Champion!!!!

Anyone who knows me knows that I love poker and hate poker tournaments.
Anyone who knows poker knows that only cash games are true poker and tournaments are stupid. This is science, don't argue with it.
Anyway, over the past five years I have steadily lowered the number of tournaments I play in. I used to play maybe 5-7 per year, but this year I played one in Vegas this summer and decided I would be a non-participant for the rest of 2013 and possibly forever.
I broke my oath the other day, made a couple thousand bucks and met some d-bags worthy of a blog.


On Thursday I drove the two hours to Winstar Casino, home to the biggest poker room in Oklahoma, arriving at 12:30 p.m. This is typically about the time that the cash game I play in begins. On this particular day, however, there were only a few names on the list and it looked like it might be an hour or more before it began.
A few tables away, a tournament had begun. There was a small weeklong series of special tournaments going on, and Thursday's tournament was half no-limit hold em, half pot-limit Omaha. The tournament was only $230 and I enjoy Omaha, so I came up with a plan. I would enter the tournament and try to win a big pot within the first hour. If I lost it wouldn't cost me much and I could still play the cash game, but if I won I would have a chance at making some good money in the tournament.
The timing worked out perfectly. Just as the cash game was about to start, I was dealt a strong draw and moved all in against two other guys. I made my draw on the last card and now had three times the tournament starting stack.
From a starting field of 54, I coasted into the final table. The tournament was only set up to pay 6 places, but as soon as we got down to the final 9 everyone wanted to change the payouts so that 9th, 8th and 7th got a little money. This is reason #2213 why tournaments are stupid. There's always going to be someone who is the first person not to get paid. Why not just go with how the tournament was set up? Yet this is standard tournament fare.
Changing the payouts like this requires a unanimous vote. Someone suggested it, everyone else loved it, and then I voted against it. The whole table turned on me like I was a leper who said bad things about their mommas.
"That's fine. This guy doesn't wanna do it. We'll just bust him," one dude said.
"You're gonna regret that when you get busted and get nothing," a lady said.
"We've played for 6 hours now, we all deserve to at least get our money back," an old codger said.
"Blah blah blah tournaments blow," is what I heard.
I had an average chip stack at the time, so it wasn't like I was guaranteed to even make the money, yet everyone seemed to assume I was being a selfish jerk by wanting to play by the rules they set up. Every few hands, I was again offered the chance to pay everyone at the table. I continued to decline.
One guy folded a pot and said, "I would have played that hand and probably gotten busted, but this guy (pointing at me) must not like action so I guess we'll all keep folding."
Whatevs bro.
Someone got knocked out and we were down to eight, and they started it up in full earnest again.
"You still gonna be heartless and not let everyone get their money back?" one guy said. To prove I didn't care about the money, I moved all in on a bluff and showed my hand. This only proved to the rest of the table that I was stupid. They promised I would regret the decision.
They were right, I regretted my decision to enter a tournament.
Someone else got busted and we were down to seven, and now the urgency was like we were on the Titanic and there were seven spots left on the last lifeboat.
"Please, sir, just $200. Let the guy get his money back. We've been playing too long to walk away empty-handed."
At this point I figured saying yes would be as close as I'd ever get to the feeling of curing cancer or achieving world peace, so I finally acquiesced and one guy literally let out a huge sigh of relief.
Just as soon as I had them on my good side, I lost them with a snide comment I couldn't help but make.
"It seems like you probably shouldn't be playing a $230 tournament if $200 is such a big deal to you."
Cue silence, dirty looks.
We kept playing and soon we were down to four people. All four of us had relatively equal chip stacks, so naturally someone brought up the idea of chopping (splitting the remaining prize money equally).
The same guy spearheaded the $200 payout and the 4-way chop. He was the definition of a tournament drooler d-bag, about 40 years old with sunglasses he wore every time he was involved in a hand, a crew cut and an attitude that made it clear he thought he was better than the rest of us in every aspect of life.
I was hoping that by caving in on the $200, I would be able to get out of the chop scenario more easily. Wrong.
This dude gets out his phone and says, "I just did the math. It's $2200 for all four of us to just walk away right now. Let's all win."
The other two players immediately agree, leaving me to be the jerk again. Evidently when you enter a tournament, you are not allowed to choose to actually play the tournament out until someone wins. You go cut-throat until you get down to half a dozen, and then you are required to turn into a Communist and make sure everyone wins the same amount.
"I guess you guys make these final tables all the time," I said. "But this is new to me so I kinda want to play it out and see what happens."
That excuse didn't fly, so Douchey McGee kept at it. After saying no six times, I started ignoring him, which only made him madder and madder.
Out of nowhere, one of the other two guys says, "So, did we all agree on the $2200 yet?"
Serenity now.
McGee got more aggressive in his tactics. First it was, "You're going to regret it when you walk away with $1000 when you could have had $2200." Then it was, "I'm just trying to be nice. No matter what, I'm going home to great job and three kids and a great life. I win no matter what. I don't know if you can say that, but I'm just being friendly." Then finally, "I'm going to make you regret not chopping. I'm gonna bust you and then the three of us can chop it."
When that didn't work, he went into terrorist mode.
"OK buddy, here's the deal. This is your last chance. If you don't agree to the $2200 right now, then I'm not doing any deals at all. Don't even talk to me about it."
I just rolled my eyes at him. Then I tried to bluff him in a pot and that didn't work.
So now I have less chips than anyone else. McGee has the most, but not much more than the other two guys. He immediately reneged on his promise of non-negotiation.
"OK guys, I have the chip lead now. I'll take $2600, and the three of you can chop up the rest of it." I suppose in theory this would have been a good deal for me, but the other two guys would have been getting screwed. Besides which I would rather get 4th place and less money than cave in to this dude.
So we kept playing, and soon I found myself all in with about a 20% chance to win the pot. When we turned our hands face-up, McGee yelled, "We're down to three! We're down to three!" Unfortunately for him I got extremely lucky on the last card and won the pot. Without saying a word, I gave him a nod and a wink as I scooped the chips.
We played some more, and nobody busted out. Finally around midnight the blinds got so high that there was virtually no element of skill left. We all four still had roughly the same amount of chips. After several hours of saying no to these same three guys, I finally said, "OK boys, I give up. I'll chop it."
Douchey McGee says, "Hold on now. I want to see if that's a good deal for me. I think I'm still the chip leader."
So he makes us all count our chips. Turns out, I had the most chips, but just barely. Still, I made him acknowledge my chip lead when he agreed to the deal.

Thus ends the story of my final tournament of 2013. A free $100 to anyone who catches me playing one before then.