The whole story

Took 4th place in a $4.40 180-player SNG last night, raking in about $57. Yay, woo hoo, good result, right?

Maybe yes, maybe no. In every tournament where you aren't the last one standing, afterward you naturally focus overly on that last hand. You know, the one where you hesitated a few tense moments before swinging the bet slider all the way to the right, clicked "Raise $(everything I've got left)" and winced, hoping not to hear the clink of the other player calling you. Then you instantly regret to see that yes, he did have you outkicked, and the board brings no miracles. IGHN.

In this case, four of us remained at the final table. Our chip leader (t120,000) had properly taken a LAGgy strategy as we got shorthanded. Thus, it was not unexpected to see him min-raise under the gun to $3,200, which was the going rate for buying the blinds. Button folds to me in the small, where I find A9o. Now, ace-nine is usually crap, but at this table it's a premium hand, and my t15,000 isn't earning any interest on its own (especially since the middle stacks are in the t40K range, far outside my reach unless I double up a couple times). I swing the bar and take a deep breath as I click. T120K shows me his AK, which holds up.

The simplistic, chump way of summarizing this hand is that I got donked out again with ace-trash against ace-better. Ace-better stencils another fish onto his fuselage, and I feel bad. But that view's way too narrow. This was a final-table situation with a big stack who could afford to raise/call with a wide starting range against the shortest stack. Earlier in the tourney I'd properly folded even AJ, 99 and 55 to early-position shows of strength, I stole blinds from average stacks with trash, and successfully goaded short-stacks to push into my KK and TT. And the luckbox was AWOL: I was never involved in a suckout. Each time, the best hand going into an all-in was the best hand coming out. I lasted longer than 176 other players; that has to mean something. Yeah, it was a good tournament and a good result.

What's my point? I think it's simply that 179 of 180 players in this tournament have a story about their last hand and how things might have turned out differently if they'd pushed earlier in the hand or else folded it entirely. One hundred and seventy-nine regrets. But the final hand is not the metric of your performance; it's really just the epilogue of a long story. The trick in advancing from a beginner poker player (where I am today) to an intermediate poker player is to study the whole story, even the parts that didn't have exciting, unexpected, or drastic endings, and learn from all of it.