So I'm back in Louisiana visiting the folks for Thanksgiving. In between big homecooked meals and football, both televised and backyard, I found the time to play a little poker.

First, though, I forgot to mention that I finished 21st in the Stars 2nd Chance on Sunday. A really disappointing and frustrating run, but the positive note was that I played a better tournament game on Sunday (including the Million and FTOPS ME) than I had in a long time. I feel confident enough in that to start mixing in a few more tournaments,

Heads-up has been pretty variance-filled lately. I took a couple shots at 2/4 recently that went poorly. Today my session started out terribly but I stuck with it and ground back about half of what I had lost, which is at least something to be happy about. Just gonna keep at it...

I meant to write more, but it's late and I'm pretty tired. Maybe tomorrow.

Now that I've played a few FTOPS events, I feel qualified to comment on what I've observed since my return to tournaments. My conclusions? Well, read the subject line.

I found a few things stood out as noteworthy in my tournament play this week:

1)People are even worse than I remembered.
2)It's really hard to take advantage of that.
3)I don't have the patience to wait around at a nine-handed table for premium hands, if I think making a move will work.

Unfortunately, none of my moves worked, despite my reads frequently being correct. I busted Sunday's event thusly: Opening with a pot-sized raise on the button with AQ, the BB called. He pretty quickly potted the 652 flop, which I took as an obvious sign of weakness. I called to take it away on the next street. The 8 turn came, he thought for a few seconds and potted again. I had a pot-sized shove left over his raise, so I shoved. He called pretty quickly with K6o. As usual, an expert play on every street that gets rewarded because I'm too stupid to know when people can't be bluffed off garbage.

After piling up some chips in last night's FTOPS I lost about half my stack with AA to A4o (brilliant job defending from an UTG raise and making trips, sir), and then the rest when a loose clown with a huge amount of chips potted 72s PF and I flat called on the button with QQ (due mostly to stack sizes and setting up a good postflop pot size for an overpair). He pot/called the 754 flop and turned a 2.

Sweet.

I busted the 100r event on Saturday by losing three consecutive races, two as the favorite and one as the slight dog (to somebody who called PF with 42s and open jammed two pair on the flop-- I had AKdd on a 542dd flop).

It's just really frustrating playing tournaments. People make so many egregious mistakes, and I seem to have forgotten how to take advantage of them. Either I bluff people who can't be bluffed, or I get outdrawn or lose races. The nature of what it takes to win a tournament is so capricious that I'm not sure I can ever really move back into them. When I'm playing heads-up, I can get inside my opponent's thought process, figure out what he's doing, what his moves represent, and how to take advantage of that on every single hand. In a tournament, I have to cross my fingers and hope I can get in a pot with a donkey, and then hope the donkey puts his money in bad, and that my hand holds when he does. If it doesn't, that's it. I don't get to reload; I don't get another chance at those chips. If I didn't bust out, I have fewer chips to use as a tool, which means my relative EV has gone down too.

I do have one funny bustout story, only funny because of how it happened. I was grinding some heads-up cash and entered the Full Tilt Mulligan on Sunday because I hadn't quite gotten my tournament jones out of my system. I draw a pretty tough table to start so I decide to not get too fancy and wait for a hand. So I'm patiently folding, concentrating on cash, and then I look up and see that I have 2700 chips in the SB, a raise and reraise, 3 cold callers, and AK. So I just said to myself "Well, I'm gonna bust here, but this is standard tournament play, LOL donkaments," and shoved.

The actual action in the hand: shaniac UTG opened for a minraise to 60, and UTG+1 made it 225. SirWatts cold called in MP; two other people called as well. So by the time it got to me, despite two people taking very strong lines, I see a big pot and AK and even if I'm assured to be called I'm getting like 1.6:1 on my money to shove it in here, so I do.

UTG+1 re-shoves pretty quickly, at which point I figure I'm toast, because he must have a big pair and even if I have outs I'm just not gonna get there, because I don't get there. Action goes back to SirWatts who tanks for a long time and then finally calls all-in. The button also calls all-in.

Imagine my surprise when UTG+1 turns over AQs. Watts, as it turns out, was tanking forever with Kings (!), which makes me wonder what would have happened if he actually laid it down. The button has 87s, and given the odds he was getting to go big or go home, I like his play better than the AQs play, anyway. So of course I have two outs and miss and that's that.

I still found the hand funny, which at least, made that the best tournament I've played this month. Unfortunately, I don't play tournaments for amusing bustout stories, so if things don't pick up soon, I might re-retire from them.

We'll see how some more FTOPS events go. I'm skipping Wednesday and Thursday's events, because I put live music over poker, but I should still have time to play a few more and try for that second big score I've been dreaming of.

Was out of town for four or five days there so I didn't get a chance to play or write -- I was hardly ever at a computer.

However, the FTOPS is starting today, and while I won't be playing tonight's event, I will be playing some of them later on, for my first tourney action since the WCOOP. I'm not going back permanently-- I'm still playing HU cash-- but this seems like a good time to give tournaments a shot on the side in hopes of a big score.

I'll probably have something to say about what I observe returning to the tournament game; I have a hypothesis that people get too wrapped up in current trends on how to play, and forget how to simply play well. I plan to test that and report the results.

I have a couple of ideas for strategy posts; to be honest, I'm kinda waiting to play hands that illustrate them well.

And I'll have, as requested, a bit of a report on Austin, what I like about it, and why I live here now.