On monday i chopped 50/50 for 671 bucks in a field of 323 playing in a regular no limit hold em tourney. Pretty exciting but it was a rough 4 hours or so. I dont remember too much about any specific hands but i do remember making most of my gains with sets, which is pretty no brainer stuff. Initially my tourney started off rocky when i lost with KK, JJ and AKs which all in all i think i played reasonably and was a little unlucky, but I guess I was lucky to still be in it. Going from my initial 3000 to less than 1000 i had to rebuild and took coinflips with AQo and 77 i think in pretty good spots. From then on i was fine and played my usual game, with a few donkeys really donating some chips to me, quickly building my stack. 2/3 of the way through the tourney i was chip leader and all was going well but this is when it started getting sour. The blinds were getting big now and I hadn't been getting any hands, but I think I was in the cutoff when utg+1, an aggressive player with about 3/4 of my stack raises 4x. Everyone folded and i smooth called, with the intention of getting him all in on the flop. The flop was J high, the rest rags. He pushes, which is when i considered whether he had a set of jacks, but i figured it was unlikely and called it. He flips over 88 and i was ecstatic. Turn card.. 8! Bummer. Now i had a baby stack and the bubble was approaching. I pretty much sat tight hoping to make the money, making some nice steals on the button and in the CO while everyone folded away waiting for the bubble to pop. Quite a while went by and i finally did make the money which was surprising, but lots of people started to really implode. As i started to get a few hands AQ, QQ, 1010, AK things started to turn and i chipped up a bit and pretty much cruised to the final table with a much smaller than average stack, about the same as the other few small stacks but worryingly small compared to the big stacks. I pretty much sat tight and watched the other small stacks go all in and die to the big stacks. Eventually i had to make a few moves and fortunately the big stacks were kind enough to make some donations. From then on i saw a reasonable amount of flops, probably 25% and felt like i was outplaying the opposition. Soon it was down to 4 players and i was chip leader again, finally! Dont remember much after that but it didnt take long, and most of the play was pretty desperate stuff from the other players, with some pretty awful bluffs as well. When it was down to 2 players we had about the same amount of chips but i ground him down with what i thought was solid heads up play. Eventually he was down to 200k in chips and i had about 800k so it was looking juicy. I called his all in pre flop with J10s, which in hindsight was probably a mistake but i took the chance. He flipped over k7o and hit a 7 which was largely irrelevant anyway. After a few hands i offered him a chop which he agreed to. Our chip stacks were almost identical, so i split by chip counts, i think he got 2 dollars more than me 
I had been playing for a few months on poker stars but I have been with pokerstrategy for a few weeks now and everything has been going pretty good. I started with the free 50 on party poker which i turned into 150 in the first day, moving up to .10/.25 nl playing sss. After less than a week i cleared the $100 bonus and my bankroll was over 1k which was really exciting. After my first week i was playing .25//50 nl and my winnings have been steady, nothing like the winrate of my initial week but still reasonable. Now you can find me playing between .25/.50nl and 1/2nl, but also at the $11 to $33 mtts and stts. Massive credit to pokerstrategy.com, i think they do provide some really good resources for new players and i have learnt a ton. I have also read hold em for advanced player and no limit hold em theory and practice by sklansky and found them to be excellent as well. This is my first post so tell me what you think, but please be nice!
Seeya at the tables!
