Day 2 Legends Frustrations

[bruce]

I just read CardPlayer and Ted Forrest discussed his frustrations of being unable to come up with a game plan at
the Commerce's WPT final table. This is exactly how I felt
after being eliminated day 2 of the Legends tournament and still I haven't been able to
reconcile things. Anyway I began day 2 with around 19000 which was right around par, and blinds were 200/400/75. There were threee shorter stacks than me and three very large stacks. My plan, initially, was to be aggressive enough to maintain my chip count without doing anything stupid or too risky. Two of the big stacks were weak internet qualifiers and there was another lively player three to my left. Padraig
Parkingson was two to my left, a bad sign I figured, but he
had a short stack. So I thought I had a reasonable strategy, we had 90 minute rounds and I had three targets to
attempt to double and hopefully quadruple up on.

What happened? Within the first 45 minutes Padraig quadrupled up with AQs making two backdoor flushes. Padraig
then became very active. I never once was able to steal the blinds. Everytime I raised I was reraised and was forced to
fold. Padraig, with his newly acquired big stack was aggressively defending his blind and reraising. I was never able to match myself up against the soft spots. Two players with medium stacks doubled up against the soft spots when they were practically given themselves chips. I had no such
good fortune. I'm not trying to come across like a cry baby, that's not my intention. As a result, I slowly began to bleed and eventually hemorrhaged. I don't ever recall playing an event where I was never able to steal the blinds, not even once was I successful in day 2.
It wasn't like I was raising like an idiot. After it became
obvious that raising before the flop was a zero sum game I really became very frustrated and confused. I felt exactly like Ted
Forrest did in his CardPlayer interview, I was unable to come up with a game plan or modify my strategy. It certainly did not help things that I was completely card dead. The biggest pocket pair I had was
Fives and I had AQo once. Did I experience the normal volatility associated with tournament poker or was there
something differently I could have done?

Comments appreciated.

Bruce