Justin Bonomo Blog

The $5,000 Mixed Holdem event at the 2008 WSOP was one of the smoothest events I’ve ever played… until the end, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

We started with 10,000 in chips, and I steadily climbed up to 35,000 during Day 1. I had one mistep where I overplayed TT (my one big mistake of the tournament) vs. a smaller stack who had aces. Of course, Hellmuth was at the table and told me that it was obvious the other player had a big hand. He was definitely right. Fortunately for me, he was wrong three hands later when he called my big bet on the river. I crippled Hellmuth and won back all the chips I had lost the earlier hand. I even got a free trip to Camp Hellmuth where I learned that Hellmuth, who is “by far the best all around hold-em player in the world” (LOL!), would never play as impatiently as I did (note that Hellmuth was playing twice as many hands as me).

Anway, I don’t want to make this blog about him. Sorry for that rant…

I steadily stayed at around 35-40,000 in chips until the final hand of the day. On that hand, I raised A-6s in NL and got three callers. The flop came A-K-6 and one of the blinds had K-6. We obviously got all of our chips in on the flop, and I was up to 80,000 at the end of Day 1.

Day 2 was even smoother than day one, but I have to admit I got very lucky in the limit portion. I didn’t suck out or anything, but I never lost a single big limit pot. I always started with the best hand, and it always held up. Some players don’t realize how lucky you have to get for that to happen. This was especially lucky because the stakes were huge in limit compared to the no-limit action.

The day ended at around 2 am (5 am on the east coast), and as soon as it ended, I called my parents and told them I wanted to fly them from Virginia to Vegas for the final table which would start in twelve hours. They flew out, and my brother drove up from LA as well.

As it turns out, I actually knew the other eight players at the finalt table, including David Williams as we’re both representing Bodog. Despite that, it was a very tough final table, but I was fortunate enough to have the aggressive players on my right and the tight players on my left. I was able to play back a little bit against the aggressive players, while avoiding confrontation with the tighter players. I climbed from 500,000 all the way to a million without playing any huge pots.

The next thing I knew we were down to 4 players, and that was when I won my first major coin-flip of the tournament. Roland de Wolfe raised pre-flop, and I called from the big blind with A-9 of spades. The flop came 8-high with two spades, and I check raised all-in. He tanked for a minute before calling with K8. I was a slight favorite, but only by a few percentage points. The turn didn’t help and it was looking like I was going to be the new short stack. Instead, a beautiful queen of spades on the river gave me the chip lead.

Shortly after that and I was heads-up against Erick Lindgren. He was the last person I wanted to play heads-up since he had the most limit heads-up experience of anyone at the table. He played very well and got extremely lucky, a pretty tough combination to beat. I was pretty card dead during the heads-up portion, but I did manage to flop two pair twice in limit when the blinds were pretty big. Unfortunately, I lost both of those hands. Even though I lost, I’m extremely happy that Erick finally won a bracelet.

Obviously I wanted to win, and I was extremely depressed after getting knocked out, but I feel a lot better about it now. Overall, I played really well, despite that one big mistake I referenced earlier, and this is also my biggest cash to date. I now have had eight cashes over $100,000 and 11 over $75,000, but this was only my FIRST cash over $200,000. After so many “kind of big” scores, it’s nice to have finally broken the $200,000 mark.

So basically I’m free rolling on the WSOP now, but don’t expect me to treat it like one. I still have to win a bracelet. I’m not going to make any claims like “I’m going to win a bracelet this year”, but I will say that I really like my odds.

As for now, It’s time for me to buy into another event and give myself another shot at it. Wish me luck!

-Justin Bonomo (www.justinbonomo.com)

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