In poker news, after all the traveling and other bullshit with the holidays, I decided to play some tournaments this weekend. Saturday I woke up and decided to play the $9 Guaranteed Quarter Million Qualifier. I played decently well, and hit a couple good hands and managed to win a spot in Sunday’s Quarter Million Guaranteed tournament. I was extremely ecstatic about this finish because I finish 7th out of 315, which is the biggest tournament I’ve ever played in. It was quite a confidence boost too. I’ve been sucking somewhat lately, so it was nice to feel good about my poker skills again. So the tournament was on Sunday. As is the case every day, I couldn’t sleep on Saturday night, so I stayed up playing San Andreas until around 3am. I had a 8am soccer game by the airport, so I stumbled out of bed at 6:50 to make it in time. We beat the crap out of a shorthanded team and I scored an amazing goal from 25 yards out that I attribute to my new bubblebee socks. I came back home and passed out for a few hours before playing the Quarter Million Tourney. When the tournament started with 1417 people I was a little intimidated, but I was feeling pretty good about my table. There was a guy four seats to my right that would call any time I had a good hand. A couple nice flush hands and I was doubled up, and chip leader of my table. Then the guy directly across from me started hitting hands like crazy. He busted out three people which definitively better hands and bluffed out for a whole lot more. He was doing a tremendously good job of bullying the table. I did my best to avoid going head to head with him. Two hours into the tournament, There were only 500 people left and my chip stack was a little over the average. Then the trouble started, I got into a bad situation with a flush draw that didn’t work out against the bully across the table. Unfortunately I couldn’t convince myself that he actually had a hand and I called a huge raise on the river that I shouldn’t have. That took me down to 900 in chips, with blinds at 100/200. Luckily I picked up some good hands and got myself back up to 3000 in chips, when it finally happened. I hadn’t gotten a good pocket pair all day, so when I got KK UTG, I raised it up to 1200. Everyone folded except for the button, who thought about it for a long time and then finally raised all in (with more chips than me). I thought about it for a while and then decided that I really needed this to work out and went for it. Of course I had run into AA and the board didn’t help. I finished out the tournament in 374th place. It was disappointing to not have made it into the money, but it was definitely a good learning experience for me. It’s made me anxious to continue playing larger tournaments in hopes that my no-limit play will get better.