21/3000

Thats were I finished at a recent online tournament. Short-stacked and going all in against the other short; it was my AK versus his A5 and my guess is favorite 9-to-1. Of course, the flop comes 5JJ and the rest, including me, is history. Turn came 9, and after that the only outs I had to survive were K, 9, A. River came an unglamorous 7.
This took about 450+ hands...closest to the final table in a long long long time. Took sometime to focus attention away from the suck-out to what was actually within my zone of influence/ control...and this is the diagnosis: slid down the chip-count rank by playing a few hands - each with a couple of high cards, having a number of 'outs' post-flop and then chasing it all the way till the river. How do I stop doing that? and before that, why did I do it?
Probably got duped into believing that this was just the guy trying to steal all over again. Point is, if I really wanted to test that, I should have raised - may be at flop; and walked away from the hand if he still showed strength/ confidence/ poise (hell, where are the casinos?).
In summary, while i got knocked-out on the suck-out, with good tournament play, i should have never been the short stack - and at least 2.5X short-stack chips. That way, with the suck out, I could have lived to play a few more hands at least. Anyway, curiosity got the better of me and I did log in to check how 'mdh62', my slayer, did the rest of the tournament. After knocking me out, he must have been ranked 15 or so out of the 20 remaining players. Knew for sure that his 340k chips was up against it - still only about average chip count, or less.
Guess what: 'mdh62' won it!! and made $1,000+