Boother Cashes in the Heartland Poker Tour!

This is outstanding! Way to go Boother. He represented the Kings of White Lake (KOWL) and NPP with honor, distinction... and probably didn't let on he knew any of us. But, can you blame him? I'll let Boother tell the story:

"As many of you know, I won a direct buy-in to the Hartland Poker Tour (HPT) main event by winning the last quarter in my poker club, The Kings of White Lake (KOWL). The HPT was in Mount Pleasant this past weekend (Sunday, August 24) and the place was pretty crowded with poker junkies.

The main event ended up having 306 players and they were paying thru 30th place. Play finally started around 9:30 AM. Throughout the day I was able to collect chips when I got on a hot streak, and survive with minimal chip loss when I went card dead (which happened several times during the tourney). My first goal was to simply place in the money as it would be the first cash for me in a major tourney, as well as the first cash for KOWL.

Once I made it to the last 3 tables, I had a decent size stack and felt very comfortable in coasting higher up in the standings as the short stacks battled against the ever increasing blinds/antes. As the evening turned into night, more and more people were getting knocked out and soon I found myself at the final table of 10.

At that point, my next big goal was to make the final 6 so I could get some face time on TV (HPT televises the final table from each major tourney)!! I dodged a huge bullet when I raised with AQ and the player behind me goes all-in, only to have the guy behind him go all-in too!! I laid down my hand only to see KK and AA get turned up.

After that big hand, we got down to 9 players. I really never got any huge hands after that. I stole some blind/antes a few times, but also lost a few raises when I got caught trying to steal. My final hand came down to Kd6d under the gun. I decided that I had to make a stand since I only had about $200,000 in chips, and the blinds/antes were going up to $30,000/$60,000 and $5000 in about 5 minutes. On that hand, my all-in move was looking pretty good as everyone folded around to the big blind. Unfortunately, the BB called me with 99. While I hit one diamond and a 6 on the flop, after the turn and the river were blanks, my hand didn’t improve. I finished in 9th place at about 9:30 PM with a payout of $10,848.

Needless to say, winning that money was kind of bittersweet. While I was truly excited to win, I still can’t turn off my brain from running thru all the “what if’s”!!!!

It was really cool that 3 guys from KOWL stayed for the whole tourney to watch/support me!! And I was lucky that Wendy was able to make it up to the Soaring Eagle at around 7:30 PM to watch the last couple hours of play. It was really cool to have a cheering section in the crowd and to have their support.

Hopefully this will be the first of more good things to come!!" - Boother

Once again, great job Boother! - Faldo