September 2007 By John Tabatabai

John Tabatabai is a young, hyper aggressive up and coming player. Well regarded for his friendly and lively presence on the scene, John was well supported when he found himself heads up on the final table of the WSOPE in London having secured a monstrous cash and worldwide recognition...

By September, 2007 was slowly getting better for me. After starting on super low limits for my sponsors at BadBeat.com I was slowly earning my way into a few live tournaments. I felt I had been playing very well but by some strange co-incidence I had yet to make it to day 2 of any event. The WSOP ME 2007 was the first day 2 I made, and I was 4th in chips, before the usual muffs muffed me out.

After this, my sponsors asked if I would like to play WSOPE, a second chance kind of thing, needless to say my answer began with a y and ended with a friggin es!

Day 1 saw me playing in the sportsman alongside Mr PokerVerdict, Neil Channing himself. The table seemed happy to let me control it and play most pots. This didn’t lead to what I hoped would be a steady increase in chips, it was a huge roller coaster and from the start was up and down like a yoyo and at the end of the day somehow ended with just below average chips.

Day 2 was slightly tougher, good ol’ Johnny Chan was on the table as well as 2 of the eventual finalists including Johanes Kosar and Oyvind Riisem, as well as online pro Shaun Deeb. Tough! Luckily for me, after 90 minutes or so the table broke up and I was moved to another table which had a few short stacks and big stacks, so not much space for manoeuvring - and my stack was now seriously dwindling. Yet again, I got a bit of luck and got moved from this table to the upstairs section in the Empire Casino.

This table seemed to have a couple of confident Scandi pie eaters but they were short stacked, the rest were unknown to me, the beast was at last unleashed. I managed to build a nice big stack but blew it near the end of the day trying to bluff another eventual final tablist. This left me with a measly 12k in chips for Day 3, which out of the remaining 82 players left me in 81st place, just ahead of Phil Hellmuth who had 10,000 chips.

The first reasonable opportunity I had in late position I pushed my chips, hoping to get the blinds, and, unfortunately, Ryan Fronda had KKs on the button. Alas, as so often is the case against me, for once I got lucky and spiked my rag ace to stay in the tournament. I was still very low on chips but at least now I had a re-raising stack and could do something. I built the stack back up slowly and half way through the day had another big pot which because of the situation and the player I couldn’t really get out of. I had JJ v KK and luckily hit a J on the flop. After this point it really was game over. Jamie Gold, Kenny Tran, Ian Frazer and a few more full tilt players kept coming to our table, but none to much avail. Contrary to what the media makes out, Jamie Gold seemed to be quite a funny and all round good guy.

Day 4 was the most the most fun. My first time on a televised feature table, with Annie Duke, Lindgren and couple of other famous pros and of course Annette. There was a lot of action on this table, especially between Annette and myself as the big chip stacks - most of which she won by 4 or 5 betting all in usually! I was happy to get moved from this table, then I found out I had Gus on my left with a big stack!

I just played my A-game, did the best I could with the cards I got and the situations and managed to find myself at the final table. The biggest problem I had was to avoid getting into big pots with Annette as she knows I’m super aggressive and play any two, and I know she does the same. As she had direct position on me, I was happy the way the final went, we didn’t get into many big battles until we got short handed.

Three handed I lost a crucial pot with JJ v Annette’s QJ for the majority of the chips in play. Unfortunately the river was a Q which made her chip leader and me short. After this point I tilted slightly, made a mistake and got lucky to get HU with Annette with even stacks. The blind structure was great, we were left with plenty of play and for hours we played, chips moving back and forth but nothing serious happening until I limped on the SB with 5-6, she over raised from the BB. I thought about it and genuinely believed she had a medium pocket pair, plus we were deep stacked so I called. The flop came 7-6-5, she bet out 250k, I reraised to 750k. She then moved all in, I thought for a short time and still went with my read that she had a medium pair and just thought she had 88 or 99 and called. The beauty of the style of poker Annette and I play is that often we are all in or bluffing with nothing, but it seems to be the big pots that we actually have something and this was one of those unfortunate scenarios that given our history the hand from the flop played itself. Against other opponents it would have been an easy lay down, in this case it was an easy but wrong call against Annette’s 77!

Maybe next year I will win a tournament…

Check back tomorrow for the next Year In Review blog