It was almost a night of what could have been for the Allies, with a number of our players going deep in majors without great success, but when the ‘chips were down’ Paul ‘Fett’ McTaggart came to the rescue, shipping the 20k on Party for a cool $13.3k!
Paul, who has just started playing on PartyPoker again after some ‘time apart’, hasn’t always felt that he has got the rub of the green on that particular site. I feel that this can quite easily be summed up by a recent Facebook update:

“Paul McTaggart
Reminded today why I stopped playing on PartyPoker. FML I hate you! “

With this in mind and the final table drawing ever closer, I’m sure Fett was waiting for the bad beat to come to send him to the rail, but it never did. He reached the final table 4/10 and in a good position. As with most final tables, the action halted in the early stages with no bust outs for the first 15 minutes.  After a couple of ladders and a few spots where Fett had to raise/fold off around 25bb’s he got a key double up when his 66 held v his opponents AJ, flopping the 6 for good measure and giving himself a great platform for a real assault on the rest of the final table. He then went on to win a sizeable pot with AQ v AJ and got to 3 handed play with all 3 players being fairly even, one of his opponents on the more aggressive side and the other being quite passive. There was a fair bit of sparring between Fett and his more aggressive opponent and the chip counts swung back and forth mainly between those 2 players, with Fett getting unlucky several times before finally completing the job when he got it in with 88 v 77, his opponent flopping a set, but Fett rivering a straight to get to HU with almost a 2-1 chip lead. However, it wasn’t all plane sailing for Fett and his chip lead slowly evaporated, losing a couple of big 3 and 4b pots pre flop. His opponent had started to jam on any preflop action that allowed him the last bet, but Fett, wise to this now, 3b/called with A9 and held v QJ, to get back his chiplead and then quickly finished off his opponent to grab his 2^nd tournament win in 5 days, the $13k prize and more importantly the chance for another MatchBall!! Great work mate……pleasure to watch.

The other really deep run this Sunday came from our newest MatchBall winner, Ahurazor. He managed an 11^th place finish in the Champion Chip on Ongame, but was unfortunate as he was in and around the top 5 stacks for long periods of the tournament. As it neared the bubble of the final table the structure seemed to shallow and a lot of the players, not being in this scenario often, really tightened up, desperately wanting to make the final 10. Ahurazor’s stack was anywhere between 10 and 30bbs at this pont, and it was at 15bb’s with 11 player left, when he decided to 3b jam A4 on an early King_Dirk open, but unfortunately the BB woke up with AK and that, as they say, was the end of that………unlucky Trent, would have been a great end to a great week, but plenty more to come and a $2.5k consolation prize!

A few of our other players had deepish runs this Sunday, the ‘best of the rest’ was Merge, who took 17^th in the Entraction major, which was the inevitable crapshoot at the end and Olly was just unable to win that vital flip to take him to the FT. Puggy82’s day showed lots of promise early on, but sadly petered out with around 50^th place finishes in ipoker, Party and the Ongame 100k.

All in all not a bad Sunday for the Allies that was topped off with Fett’s re-kindled love for Party! Good luck for the rest of the week!