More Good News from Moscow

[JK.]

After another good tournament at Korona today I came home fairly tired to see our friend Brian playing in the Party Poker $300,000 guarantee.He wasn't in a very talkative mood as he was concentrating hard, being down to the last 2 tables and hoping for a reasonable payday.I was surprised he was playing on Party as he said how he hated the software since transferring over to PokerStars.Anyway instead of going to bed, I sat up and watched & watched for the next 3 hours as his fortunes went up and down like our resident expert yoyo.First he made the final table in about 5th spot but dropped back down to 8th fairly quickly. It was raise pre flop fold or all-in fold for a long time.Then after what seemed like ages and was actually 45 minutes, we had our first casualty followed closely by a second and they were down to 8.Brian was still lowish in chips but playing steady, folding lots of hands that I would have gone all in with.Eventually some guy had a rush of blood to the head and went all in with 6d7d but was outdrawn by KQ and there were 7 left.Everyone wanted to do a deal but the German guy who was chip leader wasn't interested and had dreams of the $63,000 first prize.Needless to say he was the butt of various comments from the other players. Brian did a check of thepokerdb.com and he had the grand total of $0 won on Party. (That's a big ZERO for all you PNW trolls out there). Perhaps he was a grandmaster of cash games.About 30 minutes later after a lot of see-sawing of stacks one more bit the dust after foolishly going up against the only other stack that could harm him with AsKs vs AA. Exit stage left - 6 left.Now the German guy was under extreme pressure to do a deal from the other players and agreed to look at the figures. On a chip split he would get $31k as the chip leader but obviously didn't like that much and exited the deal screen before you could blink.After that things started to happen, Brian was bleeding badly but after 2 all-ins found himself in the chip lead on 1.3 million. Still the german wouldn't deal.I went to the toilet and when I came back Brian was down to 675k, 'variance he said'.Average stack was over 1 million and he was down to 475k when he went all-in with QsTs which was the first 2 picture cards we had seen in ages. Called by the german guy with AJos but spiked a Ten on the turn to double up.There was one other aussie on the final table. His nick was DDaylee and he came from Adelaide. He played a good solid game all night and certainly helped Brian out a lot by folding his SB to Brian's BB when he had nothing. (maybe not so solid).After about 3 hours of final table play the german guy was getting short stacked but kept escaping by all-ins not called or by outdrawing his opponent when behind.On the last hand Brian was dealt AA in the SB and the german guy went all-in for about 890k with AJos. To the joy of the other players this meant a deal was in the offing as all others had agreed 2 hours before.Brian was 2nd in chips by only a few hundred and the four way split was made. $40k for 1st & 2nd, $30k for 3rd (Adelaide guy) and $28k for 4th (another german player).So I have to say congratulations to Brian and I have finally met someone who has won an online tournament, I just didn't expect it would be him.Looks like he will be cashed up for the $1,000 and $3,000 tournaments at Korona this week.

[yoyo]

Way to go Brian! Congrats...DanG is so, so cut right now "(That's a big ZERO for all you PNW trolls out there)."heheh...

[danielg]

nah im not cut, good to see an Aussie do well Congrats on the 40K, Just curious after the chop did brian win the thing?Dan

[Brian McDonald]

Thank you JK, yoyo & danielg for those kind words. Unlike PokerStars Dan, I don't think there is a option after the split to retain some money for the winner of the tourney, so as soon as you agree to the chop up, the game stops immediately.As I was a couple of hundred chips below the chip leader, (we both had just over 2,000,000) I was given official 2nd place. There was $138,000 left in the prize pool and we split it as JK mentioned.I was more than happy to split as with the blinds at 75,000 / 150,000 and escalating it was already a giant crapshoot and the chip lead had been circulating amongst all players.I'd like to say congratulations to the guy from Adelaide ( ddaylee ) whoever he is. I thought he played well all through the final table. He was close to the chip lead before the final table and maintained his position most of the time.Strangely enough, apart from Backgammon, I hadn't played much on Party since moving my play to PokerStars. I had copped a few bad Backgammon beats and was short on funds in my Party account, when I saw their new promotion to sell your FPP's for cash ( a miserable 1c per pt ).Anyway I traded in 25,000 FPP's for $250, won a 2nd prize the other day for $3,800 and now this one, so it's been a good 4-5 days.Oddly enough, every time I've won something, Gofor has been there at the death to railbird me. I'm going to have to stop calling him a mock.

[andyexpat]

Hey Rabbit !Nice one.I knew you would get into the decent money soon.Roll on Monte Carlo....!Cheers,Raz

[mcd]

nice work brian, good report JK

[poker777778]

Never in doubt.