Cabbage Tree - Thursday

Poker at the Cabbage Tree Hotel once again. I did not do too well tonight, probably the worst i have gone for a couple of months. I got to the game a bit late this week and had to wait until room opened up. The TD ended up opening another table and i sat down at that. My chip stack started to shrink... I was limping in with decent hands, flopping draws and missing them. I was on the short stack pretty early. Nothing squashes your play more than a short stack (small amount of chips). The objective of tournament poker is to knock players out and people will tend to call a players 'all in' rather than a regular bet. This is because of two things 1. It is a chance to get closer to the prize pool and 2. A player calling an 'all in' knows what this particular hand is going to cost. So there is no more betting unless there are still people in the hand. This is why a short stack must choose the hands they play very carefully, often having only one move ('all in').
In one hand there was a raise in early position, a big raise of 3200 and a call in late position. I looked down at an A 10. I would normally fold this hand after a massive raise and a call but i was the small blind with 300 out of 600 of my chips in the small blind. The best position i could be in according to the raises made would be that they both have under pairs like pocket 7's or 9's. The worst position i could be in would be that i was drawing to 1 card... my 10. This means that i was against hands like A Q or A K and i was a massive under dog. This was what i thought was most likely... After seeing someone accidentally flip over a Q 10 when he was trying to fold (this is bad because it means there is one less 10 i can draw to) i called. It turned out my position to win the hand was not as bad as i thought... I was up against pocket 8's and pocket J's. If i hit my A i would be a massive favorite to take down the pot. The flop was 2 4 6... sweat cards... i still needed to hit my A. The turn was a 3... this meant that i still needed an A to win the pot but, a 5 could hit for a 3-way split pot because everyone would have the same straight 2 to 6. On the river... a 5. Everyone took their chips back.
A few hands later i got my least favorite hand in poker... Pocket 10's. It is my least favorite hand because it is a hand that i have had when i was knocked out of many tournaments. After a few limpers i pushed all in for 800 more chips on top of the 300/600 blinds. I expected atleast one caller and i was right. What i did not expect was how strong the person who limped in was... He turned over pocket K's. With a K on the window (first card to hit the flop) i was pretty much drawing to running cards for either a straight or quads... which was very unlikely. I was knocked out with 3/6 tables left.