Last night I played on online tournament on Full Tilt with 443 players. By the first break I was in 25th place out of 280 remaining players. A little while later I moved into the top ten, and held pretty steady between 3rd and 8th place for the next couple of hours. By the time we got down to 60 players, I was solidly in 3rd place and playing very well. And that's when I screwed up...

I had 31,000 chips and was the chip leader at my table. Second place had 24,000 and since he was the only player who could hurt me I decided to tangle with him. With blinds and antes of 200/400/25, I raised to 1,450
with:



Everyone folded except this single opponent, who had position on me. There were now 3,950 chips in the pot as the flop came out:



I planned to overbet the pot to keep him from chasing a straight or flush draw, or hitting an ace on a later street. I bet 5,000 and he called. At this point I figured that maybe he had A-Q or A-J with the ace being a heart. I also thought 10-10, J-J and Q-Q were possibilities for him. He was a good player and I didn't really think he would chase a flush for this many chips.

The turn was:



Now the pot contained 13,950 chips, and my opponent had 17,550 left. I went ahead and put him all in, thinking he still probably had an ace high flush draw and wouldn't be able to call. I figured that he may call with 10-10, J-J or Q-Q though and that would put me into first place with a 20,000 chip lead over second!

He had:



and had hit the second nuts on me. When the hand was over I was short-stacked and unable to recover. Finished in 23rd place, but I felt I was playing well enough and had enough chips that I should have definitely made the final table, and probably could have finished in the top three if it wasn't for this mistake.

Advice please...