I spent a week back in my hometown in the midwest and was constantly amazed by the amount of poker played in this small town.  Nearly every bar has a poker tournament night to bring in customers.  The Lions Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Knights of Columbus and every country club have regular poker tournaments as well.   Home game tournaments proliferate as well. 

My brother in law brought me to one of the biggest home games that he knew about where I found 32 poker players partaking in an MTT format with the friendliest blind structure that I have ever seen.  We started with 940 chips each while the blinds started at 1/2 and rose every 15 minutes.  The blinds went up slowly with 1/2 followed by 2/4, 3/6, 4/8 and 5/10 and then doubling thereafter.   This lovely structure led me to immediately revert to typical  'Harrington' style tournament play.

Using Harrington's tourney style I slowly amassed chips with weak starting hands from late position since I had horrible cards all night.    I administered one bad beat on a poor player who refused to be bluffed off a pot that I raised preflop from late position with AT.  He was in the SB and called with his AQ.  The flop was 992 and he regretted calling me down to the river when a ten hit and doubled me up to above 3000 chips.   From there it was tight, aggressive play that propelled me to the final table with the third largest chip stack. 

Patient play on the final table and a fortunate position with the two larger stacks to my right enabled me to play down to the three of us large stacks with all the remaining chips after my TT held up against the 4th place finisher' 88.  The three of us big stacks battled back and forth until I finally caught the 3rd place finisher bluffing into my 2 pair and I entered the heads up section with slightly more chips than my opponent. 

The friendly blind structure continued to give us room to maneuver during heads up play and I was constantly raising and running over my opponent.  This forced him to start relying on all in pushes to maintain his chip stack.  I started looking for a decent hand to call his pushes with and settled on A7 after my raise was met with his 3rd consecutive all in.  He had QJ which did not surprise me in the least.  My joy at having him on an inferior hand was short lived when he hit a QQ7 board that rivered a J instead of my hoped for ace!  

I think I played well overall, continually getting all in when I had the best of it and doing very well in a tournament that was nearly 7 hours long and saw me get QQ once,  JJ, KK and AA never!