[ Posted July 2nd, 2026 ] by The Dean

Carl ‘The Dean’ Sampson.

Anyone who knows me knows full well that I have been specifically a cash game specialist. I started out playing online full time in 2026 playing nothing but limit hold’em. Since then I have had forays into all sorts of games including Stud, PLO, PLH and NLHE. I even played SNG’s for a six month period full time a couple of years back.

Well until recently I had yet to seriously touch large online tournaments but all that changed last Sunday night when I opened my account in the Cake Poker Sunday $100,000 guaranteed tournament. I had been preparing for a while because the structures for online tournaments are different than to live play and you have to play substantially faster otherwise you get swallowed up by the rapidly increasing blinds.

I intend to play at least one tournament a week on Cake Poker including their monthly $250,000 guaranteed event. So you are probably wanting to know what happened. Well it was all over and done with after 35 minutes, I was unlucky enough to get a big stack on my immediate right who kept raising everything that moved and was robbing me of plenty of stealing opportunities.

In fact my table on the whole was quite aggressive and I had fallen somewhat behind the curve with a stack of around 4100 out of my starting stack of 5000 when I get dealt pocket kings under the gun.

Just for the record there were around 780 players in this tournament and the structure allowed for 110 players to cash. The total prize money reached $110,000. Anyway where was I…oh yes…..I was about to tell you my bad beat story. Well actually as beats go it was nothing out of the ordinary but it is all part of the story so I had better tell it.

I see pocket kings under the gun and I didn’t really want to play this hand out of position. I also wanted some action on this hand and was going to take a risk in order to get back on the curve or above it. So I decide to gamble and limp in. Two players also limp and another min raises to 200 (blinds at 50-100). It is folded around to the button who goes 5000 all in.

Now the play on my table had been aggressive but it had also been bad as the level of over betting was just silly. In fact this was a great table to be on if only I could get some cards. 

But from what I had seen to date then there is no way that I am folding cowboys here and if he has aces then he is going to have to show me. So I call and the rest of the players fold and we have a very nice pot of just under nine thousand. I figured that I needed around 40k or so to be average when I hit the money and about 400k for the final table.

The cards were flipped over and I wasn’t surprised to see the hand that I did…..A-Q! I suspected that they were trying a pick up play although with an UTG limper and two blinds to hear from not to mention a min raiser then this was an absolutely terrible play. But terrible plays pay off and the obvious ace flops and I am history.

But despite this I actually enjoyed the experience. Tournament poker is something that I have been looking to do for some time but many players believe that online tournaments simply cannot be played for a living….I don’t agree. Yes they do have fast structures and yes they do need a lot of luck to win them or even to seriously cash but there are methods to these tournaments.

The dead money in these things comes from players who play in a way that is not in tune with the speed of the tournament. Many cash game players and slow playing styles that never quicken fare poorly in online tournaments or any live fast paced tournament for that matter.

I was happy with how I played which is the main thing but there really wasn’t anything else that I could have done given the cards that I had. It is possible that had I open raised with the cowboys then the A-Q on the button would have merely called and the ace arriving on the flop would have slowed me down for sure. They could have paid respect to an UTG raiser and especially one that hadn’t seen much action.

In this instance then I would have still been alive in the tournament but with an even smaller stack. But it is also still possible that the button was so bad that they could have shoved pre-flop anyway. I got my money in with the best hand but I am not a big fan of this concept in tournament poker. This is not a cash game where you have an equity edge that if repeated often enough will lead to you earning money.

This is tournament poker where you must balance accumulating chips whilst avoiding elimination. Going from 5000 to 40,000 requires only three double ups but you can double up without getting all in because when you are all in then elimination is a serious risk.

 Anyway keep a look out for my next bad beat story on All Aussie Poker where I will also be talking tactics as well.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson is sponsored by Cake Poker and can be seen at cakepoker/thedean

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