Finally made a Day 2!!!

Yesterday, I played I entered the $5k Pot Limit Holdem World Championship under the usual stake deal with my dad. You start with 10k in chips and I managed to make it to Day 2 in 26th place out of 51 people remaining. Unfortunately, you dont get into the money until only 36 people are left, so I still have to keep chipping up, as blinds will be getting pretty high.

To summarize, I started off pretty slow and wasn't able to win a pot at my first table. As our table broke, I was moved to a tough table (most of these tables are tough though) with my stack of 7800. I picked up 56 hearts on small blind and completed, as did two other limpers, one of them being Dutch Boyd. The flop came A74 rainbow and Dutch bet from the button. I was the only caller and I led out on the 8 turn to confuse him. I thought there was a good chance he had limped with an Ax hand, so I didn't want to check and then have him check behind to control the pot size, which is what I would've done with that type of hand. He called my turn bet and then my nice sized value bet on the river and mucked. This hand put me up to about 13.5k and from there I just kept winning small and medium sized pots for the rest of the night. I did make some pretty big bluffs, one of which was against Jeff Lisandro who was defending his blind from my button raise. He is an aggressive player and will push the action if he thinks you are weak. I ended up getting my whole stack in the river with complete air and he insta mucked. I don't remember the exact board, but it was a lot of middle connecting cards with only one card needed for a straight, so I felt there was enough out there to scare him off. I then showed him to try and tilt him because I knew he was a bit of hot head, but it didn't seem to affect him and he even joked about it a couple times with me later. I also had TT one hand in EP and got two callers of my raise. The board came AQx and we checked around. The turn was the K and I felt this was a good scare card for me to bluff because I felt I could represent a couple of hands:
1) A missed check-raise with AQ or QQ
2) Pocket Kings that were vulnerable to the Ace but now made trips

So I bet about 3/5 of the pot to look like I wanted a call but still was trying to get some good value from the hand. One guy folded and the other guy tanked for about 3 minutes (which is a really long time sit there staring at the felt trying not to move at all) and then finally mucked. That hand put me to right around 60k with about 20 minutes left in the night and then I just stole blinds to maintain that same level.

So now I have the opportunity to finally cash in my first World Series event, and this one would a great one to do it because first level money is $14k, so 9 grand profit, which is much more then a lot of these events. The good thing about Pot limit is that there are never any antes, so you can be patient and only have to be concerned with the blinds. My goal is to try and stay afloat around the 60k mark by staling blinds and small pots until I am able to pick up some cards and maybe win a larger pot to put me in better shape to go deep in this thing. I will give the full report after today's action. You can also follow along on cardplayer.com, but I'm not sure how often they update. I was pumped for them to finally ask for my name so that the beginning of my ink in that magazine....