Bad Play in PPM Semi-Finals

I played the Party Poker Million Semi-Finals today, which was a NL HE tournament. These are a series of large tournaments that have a $210 buy-in for the chance of winning a trip on the Party Poker Million cruise ship for the annual tournament. (Poker newbies: check out this wikipedia entry if you are unfamiliar with poker tournaments.)

The reason I play these Semi-Finals is that it's only costs $33 to play a one-table satellite tournament. In the satellite, first place (of 10) gets an entry into the semi-finals, and second and third get to play another satellite. Without fail so far, I win a semi-finals entry with one satellite buy-in and 1-3 tries at a satellite. The parlay is just so good it's worth doing.

I played pretty good poker for the first hour. I like Party's semi-final structure because the blinds go up slowly. However, when we hit 15/30 blinds, and I had a chip stack of 3,035, I made a horrible play from the BB. There were four people in the pot as a middle position player and the cutoff limped in. I checked the blind with Q 7. The flop was 7 Q 3. I decided to check-raise for a large amount. The fellow in the cutoff, a tight conservative player who had played few hands without big holdings, bet 60. I raised to 280 pretty quickly, and he called. The turn was J. Worried he might have picked up a draw, or already had a diamond draw, I decided to over bet the pot slightly, and put out 700. The cutoff player moved in for an additional 1385. I had an unsubstantiated feeling that he was drawing, and I called, for most of the rest of my chips. He showed 3 3, which held up when the river came 9.

I was destine to lose some chips on this pot, but there was no reason I had to lose nearly all of my stack. I could have simply bet 500 chips on the turn, and folded to a raise. If he had a strong queen, he would have pushed harder on the flop to make his stand (if he was to make one). The somewhat uncoordinated nature of the flop should have indicated to me that it was a very dangerous place for two pair. (This wasn't the type of player to call a big check-raise with only a big flush draw, and then make a move on the turn with it for all his chips.) Thus, check-folding the turn would have been tight-weak, but a slight under bet of the pot on the turn and folding to a raise would have made more sense. I should have done that.

I ultimately busted on an uninteresting hand. The hand above was the one that busted me, and it's my fault.