I played one of the UB $1 turbo MTTs this evening. Early on I caught great hands in good spots, and I played them well. After the first hour break I was 7th in chips with over 10000. By the next break, I was down to 5000; 20 minutes afterward, I was down to 2200 and, with blinds at 1600 and antes at 150, was forced to push on a bad ace that didn't hold up.

What happened? Usually I can trace a tournament failure to one or more bad beats or bad decisions, but this one was different. Once my stack hit its peak, I played maybe 5 hands (not including BB hands). One was AJ, which ultimately lost to AK. I didn't overplay that hand, but just called a 2x preflop raise (neither of us connected and we checked it down). The rest were marginal; KJ, Q10, suited connectors, that kind of thing, none of which connected with the flop and were thus discarded. I folded all the rest, watching helplessly as my once proud stack was devoured away to barely anything.

Granted, this was a turbo tournament, where the blinds and antes increase at ridiculous speed, but I was astonished at how quickly my fortune changed. After being in the top 10 fairly deep into the tournament, I didn't even finish in the money. Other than throwing my stack around and stealing more often when I had the chance, I don't know what I could have done differently. No bad beats or debatable calls--just a terrible run of cards that, combined with the level of blinds/antes, killed my chances.