Well I am pleased to say that yours truly took down the WPBT tournament last night in capturing my first Razz title among the blogger crew.

This event was a lot of fun, and as with the other WPBT tournaments hosted by Byron, they tend to attract a little bit more skilled crowd than most of the other weekly blogger tournaments. Part of that I'm sure is the $20 buyin, as compared to most of the other events' $10, but more than that Byron has created a WPBT "poker league" where most people actually care about winning bi-week in and bi-week out. Currently I am in the top ten on the WPBT leaderboard for Player of the Year honors, and I see this morning that winning this event has catapulted me to my highs for the year, 4th place in overall WPBT points, and more importantly, 3rd place in the average points per event category.

In any event, I managed to survive early on on the strength of just a couple of big Razz hands which I was able to score big pots with, but after that I started to get some good starting cards and I ended up reaching the final table in 3rd place out of 8. Smokkee had a huge chip lead for the entire second half of the tournament, and was hitting some incredible cards, and he and I basically took turns eliminating the field from the final table, with Pauly reaching the money along with Smokkee and myself shortly after Pauly knocked out his own brother Kameelah from the table. In the end Pauly succumbed to another bad card on 7th street (one of the themes of the night, and of any Razz event if people know how to play the game) against Smokkee, and Smokkee and I began heads-up play with Smokkee holding about a 1.5 to 1 chip advantage. I played very well heads-up in Razz, and with a little luck I ended up taking the lead, growing it significantly and then eliminating Smokkee all within the span of maybe 4 hands to take down my second WPBT title of the year.

Razz certainly lived up to its reputation as the world's most frustrating poker game last night. I have a full recap up of the tournament on my blog.