Recently I made a day trip to Atlantic City with some friends to play in the $53+$12 tournament they run on a weekly basis. We got there early with plenty of time to register, and it was a good thing too. They were a little understaffed, and the line quickly began to form out the door of the entirely too small poker room.

The tournament ended up with 86 entries, and we got underway at 11am. I did very well in the first hour, tripling up from my initial 10,000 to almost 30,000. I had a great time at my first table. The guy to my left looked like Chris Ferguson with shorter hair and a ball cap to replace the cowboy hat, and we had a good time chatting it up between hands. The far end of the table was pretty loose, and most of them ended up busting before the table broke sometime in the second hour.

Being moved from that table would be my undoing. I was in the tournament for over 4 hours, most of it spent at the table I was moved to. I was dealt three, count them, THREE playable hands the entire time I was there. And I'm being very loose when I say playable. I was dealt KK, KQo, and 67s. That was it for the entire time I was there. The rest were of the same ilk as 94o (which I was dealt at least five times), J2o, etc.

What do you do when you are dealt literally nothing for hours on end, and the rest of the table is always raising in front of you? There was literally almost no chance for me to steal, unless I were to pop a reraise in with 94o, which I'm really not keen on doing, especially since the table had a penchant for calling to the river. How do you handle this? Am I just doomed to not make the money in this tournament? How can you represent a strong hand to a person who more than likely is not going to fold or will actually have a good hand and knock you out?

I ended up finishing the tournament in 15th place. The hand I went out on was just painful. I was forced to push all in with 45 diamonds, and the big blind wakes up with pocket tens. The flop comes JJ7 with two diamonds. The turn is the 3 of diamonds, and I think I'm golden. River: 10d.

If anything, I know I definitely played a lot better than I did at Foxwoods last summer. I made a lot of stupid mistakes then, which I easily avoided in this tournament. If I hadn't been so excruciatingly card dead, I'm sure that I would have made it to the final table and the money. I'm definitely looking forward to the next time I get to play live. We'll just have to wait and see what happens next time.

Matt Silverthorn is an amateur poker player from Gaithersburg, Maryland. He writes regularly for his blog at mattonpoker.blogspot.com.