Henry As Good Luck Charm

So the only tournament I've played since musing about whether my 'just try to survive and hope to get hit by the deck later' strategy was ultimately pointless (a blog or two ago), was a late night one a couple nights back. Henry has definitely turned things upside down around here (day is night, quite literally) so I grind the poker different times every day. I started this day around 10pm, had a bunch of cash games fired up and joined one tourney, one of the myriad Stars $33 ones.

A couple hours later Henry was quite fussy. Like most people, he often just wants to be held. He'll sleep in your arms, but if you put him down he's upset again within a minute or two. Even if you just fall asleep while holding him. I don't know how he knows, in his sleep, that you've drifted off. He's like a ninja.

Anyway, his poor mother was approaching a sleep deprivation breaking point, so I shut down all the cash games and held my son while the tourney went on. Thanks to auto hot key programs, it's pretty easy to hold a baby and play an online poker tournament, so we just sat in my office.

At the time we started, I was just about into the money, having followed my extremely tight/survival mode strategy from the original ~500 runners to inside 100. We crossed into the money at number 70 or so, and then the mythical 'hit by the deck' actually happened. There weren't very many suckouts or coolers, or much of interest at all really. I just kept getting good hands. Over and over and over. Actually, the only big suckout I rememberwas this guy in the BB had a VPIP of under 5, and I was in the SB and had been raising him every single time. And once he got under 7 or 8 bb's I just raised him all-in and he just kept folding. And the hand in question I open shipped Q20 and he woke up with KK. Flop comes Q-x-2, naturally.

So anyway, I hit the final table with about twice as many chips as second place. The only drawback to things was it was a double stack tournament, and it seemed the structure was kinda slow for a small entry online tourney too. So when we hit 4-handed it was 6am. That was not the plan!

I took the 5:55am break as a chance to give Henry back to his mother, and when play resumed I was from chip leader to busto in like five minutes. I blame the departure of my Good Luck charm for certain, although it could also have been that it was 6am and I was barely keeping my eyes open and couldn't summon enough concern for the $1500 jump from 4th to 1st. I would like to be able to start up again from 4-handed, but overall I'm stoked with the result and it definitely has me continuing to wonder if this tourney strategy is really not so bad.

Now I just gotta figure out how to smuggle Henry into live tourneys...