Watched FTOPS #17

Anybody else catch the later stages of this tourney. When I logged on to FT at 6PM on Sunday, John Newcombe if I remember correctly was sitting at ~35,000. The blinds were something like 2500/5000 with 200 antes. This is from memory so not sure. His M was clearly under 10. Everyone on the rail was calling him an idiot for not pushing with any 2. He was content to blind down if needed. He was in 19th place out of 19 remaining. Payout was appr. $ 8000. 90% of the rail was continuing to criticize his play. Fast forward several hours later and he goes out in 4th for a 170000+ payday. Unreal. I'm not sure really what it says about his strategy but it was pretty amazing to see.

I still dance a fine line when dealing with M and the end of tourneys. When I first read Harrington on Holdem, it took awhile for me to correctly play his strategy when your M is 10 or less (basically I played poorly for several tourneys). Eventually I had deeper thoughts on M...but I deleted all my old posts.