As you can probably tell by the fact that I didn't post for about three weeks, day four of the WPT Five Diamond main event didn't go as planned.

I started the day 9/36 in chips with 700k at 5/10k, but spent the first few hours of the day slowly slipping down to just over 500k.

I managed to gain some momentum back when Matt Waxman tried to bluff me on a 3♠ K♠ 3♣ flop, then busting a shortstacked Steve Brecher with Q♣ Q♦ against his A♠ 10♦.

Then, just when things were looking up, I decided to try to bluff Curt Kohlberg who never folds.

After spazzing off a few hundred thousand to him I was left with just 350k when we got to 10/20k. I managed to suck out all in with J♠ 8♠ against Joe Cassidy's A♣ J♣, but then decided to donate the rest of my stack to Kohlberg so that they could be with my other chips.

My other chips would have wanted it that way.

Carter "ckingusc" King (my former WSOP roommate and WCOOP champion) opened the button the hand before my elimination and folded to a three bet from Kohlberg in the small blind.

Then he opened the cutoff to 52k with a little over 600k behind and Kohlberg just flatted on the button with a stack of about 1.4 million..

I assumed that Kohlberg would three bet with most of his big hands here since he'd just did it the previous hand and may be able to get Carter to four bet light (not too likely since Carter's pretty nitty, but Curt didn't know him and probably had a fairly reckless/aggressive impression of him at that table).

Since there was about 150k in the pot and I could increase my stack by 25% with a successful all in squeeze, I decided to move in with pocket fours. I knew it was going to be ugly when Curt immediately called after Carter folded, since Curt usually takes his sweet time to make any decision at the poker table.

He showed pocket Jacks, and they held to eliminate me in 20th place for a little under $28.6k.

Naturally I wasn't particularly thrilled with this result, but it's really nice to go deep in three consecutive events on the toughest tournament trail there is. I was pretty disappointed to see that I'd only cashed in one of 17 WPT main events with no final tables when they started publicizing that info online, but 4 cashes and one final table in 20 events has a much better ring to it.

I'm in the Bahamas for PCA right now, but will be heading to Biloxi after a few Borgata Winter Poker Open preliminary events when I return. If I manage to finish in the money in Biloxi I'll tie Daniel Negreanu and Kirk Morrison for most consecutive WPT cashes (I think, please leave a comment if I'm wrong...especially since I wasn't going to play this tournament until I realized this!).

Matt Stout