Satellite Seat won

Well, yesterday was a mixed bag of sorts. Although I did not have a hugely successful day in terms of cashes, I did feel like I played very well. I thought that my play on the whole has been very solid for the last week, although I have not played a lot.

I really enjoyed taking some time away from the tables and getting some perspective on poker and the ups and downs and loses that come from it. It is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn if you want to be a poker player. I still find myself not making some moves that I know I should be making due to courage I guess. Especially in SNGs where you need to push with perhaps any two in certain situations. It helps a lot more now that I have set up a pretty cool spreadsheet that will analyze the numbers on the fly as it were and help with some of the decision making process, or at a minimum, it can help show that a certain play was correct or incorrect after the game is over and you can sit down and crunch some numbers.

Crunching numbers can be a very gratifying experience when it shows you in black and white that you need to do things that you are not doing. It was a great comfort yesterday after I finished 3rd in a SNG when I had thought that I let some situations pass me by, but in reality I played pretty flawlessly. I thought I should have pushed all-in a couple times, but in reality, my cards were just not good enough to do it due to my opponents stack size at the time. It was very reassuring having concrete evidence that you played it correctly, instead of wondering.
Sometimes we just finish 3rd and there is nothing we can do about it.

Last night I played on Titan Poker for the first time in a Free roll set up for PokerXfactor subscribers. The prize was the final table got a ticket to play in a qualifier today that sends the top 5 on to a big tournament tomorrow. It really was a lot of fun and I think I played about as well as I could play. I made some incredible laydowns, that is if the people were truthful with what they had after the fact, which I believed most people, or I actually got to see the cards for myself.

Thinking back, and also at the time, I didn't have the feeling of, dang it, I really played that wrong. I made some plays that I thought were just outstanding. I had raised with KQss and got reraised by the big blind to 5bbs. I just called due to the fact there was so much money in the pot now. The flop came Js Xs and a card of no consequence. The BB puts in a bet that represented about half his remaing stack of which was almost 1/2 pot bet. From the time the flop hit I had thought that I was going to push all my chips in if he checked it to me, because I had two over cards and the 2nd nut flush draw. I thought I had a pretty strong hand, plus the back door straight, and straight flush draws still. Because he bet half his remaining chips and the pot was sitting at about 2900 chips now and I only had 1600 left I shoved them all in. He thought about it for a while and folded. That was a really good hand for me.

Later on when it got down to the final two tables I doubled through the chip leader when he raised and I shoved in the BB with 55 and won. I had to hold on and I did not play another hand the rest of the time. Luckily there were several people that just did not have a clue on satellite tournaments at the end and busted out by going all in when they didn't need to. There were several really short stacks left, and I am happy to say we both made it.

Final tabling any tournament is a great feeling for sure, and winning a little money and advancing is icing on the cake.