Save John Knighten Tournament

This one was a special deal, not part of the $50 into $100K goal. John Knighten is a firefighter, a friend of ours, in desperate need of a pair of bone marrow transplants. Transplants for which he doesn't have all the necessary money. His family has undertaken a number of efforts to raise money for those procedures. One of them, a fundraiser poker tournament at Hooters, was held today. $100 buy-in with 32 players.

Tournament structure was excellent, exactly how I like it, with slow-increasing blinds and plenty of chips in plenty. Unfortunately, a perfect structure doesn't help if you run card-dead and that's exactly what happened to me today. I figure I probably played 70 hands today, maybe more. In that time, I got exactly one pocket pair - 4s. On the other hand, I got 7/3 - literally - like six times. No joke, I got a 3 in my hole cards probably 40-50% of the time. Unbelievably bad run of cards. End came when I misplayed Q/7 as follows:

Blinds at $500/1000, me with $7000 total in the big blind. I limped in, BB checked. Flop comes 4/5/6, we both check. Turn is a 7. Figuring top pair and an open-end straight draw is good, I push all-in for my list $6000, big blind insta-calls and turns over 9/3 for a made straight. River was a blank and I busted out in 16th place. So, what should I have done differently? Should have either pushed all-in pre-flop - big blind surely would have folded his 9/3 there - or folded. Instead, I go broke playing a marginal hand, misreading possible hands for my opponent. Bad play. Played as well as could be expected the rest of the tourney given the cards I had to work with though. 16th place.

The good news? My friend - and former physical therapist - Darren took 3rd. He freerolled into the tournament when my brother-in-law ended up not being able to play, giving him a seat in return for half the prize money. He played well, had a couple keep double ups and then watched the big stacks annihilate each other in front of him. 3rd place was good enough for him to get a nice payday and my brother-in-law to get his entry fee back. Well done, Darren!