Off to a Good Start

My 2nd year of playing online got off to a rousing start as I managed to take down 1st in a $5.50 buy-in short handed MTT over at Poker.com.

The critical suckout hand I will describe below :

Middle Rounds. Got AKs in late position. I pop in a raise for around 3.5x BB. One caller, don't
remember if it was the SB or the BB. Flop comes K 5 5. Good flop for me. The caller who is a player from China checks, so I bet out 3/4 pot and gets cold called rather quickly. At this point in time, I thought to myself, he can't have played an A5 with the raise. Even more unlikely is the 5 5. So I put him down on something like KQ or KJ which I dominate.

Turn is a 2. China guy checks again so I pop out another 1/2 pot bet. China guy thinks for a while, then suddenly reraises me all in. Alarm bells start to ring. Did he really play an A5?

If you've played with players from China before, you will notice that they're pretty fearless and will bluff at a lot of pots with midpair or draws. This was the only reason and the fact that I got him covered by a small amount that I called.

Guess what he showed ? 5 effing 6. Yep he played a 56 with the preflop raise. This completely threw me off. Good thing the river squeezes out another K (2 outer). And my full boat Ks over 5s beats his 5s over Ks to bust China guy out.

Man! Talk about lucky. After that, had good stack and just played ABC poker to make it to the FT easily. Final Table was straightforward as I got some good hands which paid off. Heads-up was against a pretty passive player who got lucky a couple of times. He called my KJ all in with his QJ. Rivered his Q. My DSL connection got cut for about 5 minutes which allowed him to steal a lot of pots.Managed to fight back with some aggressive play to gain a slight chip lead. Finally got him to commit an all-in with his A-rag against my pocket 3s. No improvement and that was it. 1st place. Woohoo .....

The cash was not really that significant but being the last man standing certainly feels good. =)