3 PM Sep 16 2012, Riverside (Laughlin, NV), 8th (60 entries)

This was the weekend version of the same tournament I played Thursday evening. No tournament is played on Saturday, so the Sunday afternoon tournament has more entries than the evening tournaments during the week.

Once again I managed to make it to the final table, but this time, with more entries, it turned out that the chip leader had a huge chip lead over the rest of the field. The player with the chip lead offered to sacrifice his potential $500 payout for 1st place if the other players would agree to give him $250 and split the remaining $750, but unfortunately for me (given my literal "chip and a chair" circumstance entering the final table), nobody warmed to that idea. Since I only had one ($1000, in tournament dollars) chip left, I offered to only take a $50 share, leaving $700 to be split among eight players, but this offer was similarly uninteresting to those players.

Actually when I asked the player to my left, who had the second-biggest stack, if he was willing to agree to any splits, he said no. So having just the second-highest stack afforded him the luxury of sitting back and watching the chip leader be the party-pooper instead of him!

Luckily for me, my position to start the final table was pretty close to the button, so I got to see several hands for free. However, unfortunately for me, everyone was playing pretty tight, so the chance of multiple players going out before the blinds got to me were extremely slim.

Having caught nothing but garbage the first several hands, when I was under the gun and about to be forced to play my last chip with a random hand, I managed to catch

With this being a substantially better-than-average hand, first to act I went ahead and slid my chip out into the pot and hoped for the best.

There were two limpers before it got to the big blind, then, mostly to my dismay, the big blind went all-in with a fairly good-sized stack. The other two players folded, and as I had pretty much guessed, the big blind turned over

Neither of us caught any piece of the board on the flop and turn. With my tournament life about to end, a miracle card hit on the river:

I suddenly had four chips instead of just one! But alas, they didn't turn out to be enough. I waited out hand after hand until the big blind got back around to me. The two random cards I was forced to play my last chips for weren't great, but they had potential:

The chip leader, two seats to my left, had put out a sizable raise and shooed everybody else out of the hand. His hand wasn't exactly the sort of hand I would have most liked to see, but it could have been a lot worse:

Neither one of us paired and there was no flurry of diamonds, so I finished out of the money in 8th place.