Played at a 20$ tourney that is only 5 minutes from my home, which is a refreshingly short drive. The next closest, the N'erk tourney is more like 12 minutes, and has a bizarre blind structure at a steep price.
There were 13 of us playing basement poker. I mostly sat tight, since there were very few raises respected all night. At a minimum, seemed like the SB and BB would call with damn near anything. This meant I got to observe other people playing, some well, some atrociously.
Had pocket aces early and managed to collect without incident, and I busted a guy with my Ac Qc after he called me with AJo and couldn't let it go on an AKQ flop. In other games, I would have expected him to have AK, and so I had a big relief on the river when a queen fell. Comical that I didn't require the extra card. Generally, I needed cards to win a pot since somebody was always calling down with second pair, sometimes even ace high on a busted draw. There were a couple players whose raises were respected by the group, which was also funny since one of them was raising pre-flop and betting into pots with a frequency well outside of any reasonable card distribution.
After nursing my short stack well, (I doubled up once on KJo after pushing on a J-high flop), I got knocked out when my AKo met AQs all-in pre-flop. That was after 3 hours of play with four of us remaining out of 13.
Then I played cash for a little while. I enjoyed the tourney, but I don't think I can play ultra-low cash games anymore. (There was a single blind of 0.25 to win.) There's no buzz in it for me.
