Tonight's update on the real-money online gambling experiment:
After losing at the $5.50 and $11.00 tournament levels, I shot almost my entire remaining $25 wad on a nine-player tourney with a $22 buy-in.
Clearly, this was do or die. I'd have to finish in the top third—to get paid in a nine-player tournament, you gotta win, place or show—or spend my last three dollars in the small-change leagues trying to scrape up another five-dollar buy-in.
I ended up finishing second, with only one scary all-in moment when my ace-king prevailed over my opponent's pocket tens for a huge chip increase. The finale was a back-and-forth two-player battle that saw the chip lead change with every hand. It finally ended when my nut flush got wrecked by his full house with all my chips in the middle. Not the result I wanted, but good enough for a $54 payout.
So far I've finished in the money in four of the nine real-money tournaments I've played. I'm now sitting at $57, just shy of triple the $20 I originally invested.
On the spreadsheet I'm using to track all this, I made sure the calculation for each tournament result works by counting the buy-in as a negative number. It's how I remind myself that in this game you always start in the hole, and finishing in the money is the only way to dig yourself out.
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