September Recap + MTT Surprise

Hello!

September is already over and I have to say it wasn't a very exciting month poker-wise. I got super lazy and didn't put in a lot of volume. I was playing far less hours than I'm supposed to each day and then halfway through the month André decided to take a week off. That is totally understandable since he was working 10+ hours per day and was feeling burnt out. The bad thing is that I ended up pretty much taking that week off as well, even though I should be working more than normal to cover up for lost time. But when you are feeling lazy and you have your significant other sleeping until noon, watching TV or inviting you to go out it's very hard to resist and not tag along!

After André's week off was over, I got back to work but had some downswings that affected my mood and resulted in me procrastinating for a couple more days. The graph I have to show for September is not very pretty:

Yup. Final result: 4.6k games and -$118. Which is awful, not because of the break-even result but cause of the lack of volume. But what's done is done and there's no need to cry over spilled milk. I can just try my best to avoid this situation in October.

That said, the boring month of September decided to make a big exit. Yesterday was my last day playing for the month. I forced myself to wake up early to get the opportunity to play more games. You see, I was still missing some points for the 6.500 VPPs Supernova threshold. So there I was playing, when at 11:00 an MTT popped up. I found it really strange cause every other day of the week the satellites that I play in the morning feed tournaments that start 11:30. I should have another half hour, right? I checked it out and of course, the Bigger $33 starts at 11:00 on Sundays. Way to go girl!

When the tournament started, there were around 450 players registered but they kept coming. I checked the lobby, it said that late registration would be open for two hours. Geeeee, this is gonna take forever! When the registration closed there were 1852 total entrants. The top 234 that got paid seemed to be faaar far away so the chances of me getting my buy-in back were slim. I thought okay, calm down, instead of taking a two hour break until the $12 hyper satellites come back, you're just gonna play this one. I was basically ignoring the tournament, playing extremely tight while facebooking and youtubing. What do I know about playing with 100+ blinds anyway?

But two hours later, I was still alive at the MTT and the blinds had gone up quite a bit, bringing most people to around 10-20 BBs. My kind of game. Excellent! Since I had an idea about how to play and it had gotten more interesting, I decided to give it my full attention and not open any satellites on the side. Things kept going well, and before I realized what was happening we were close to the money. I had a decent sized stack and just had to not go crazy in order to be alive when the bubble burst. After it did, I was counting down in tens. Okay, let's make it to the top 100. Okay, now let's try to make it to the top 90. Now top 80... And so on.

When it was down to 4 tables, I started eyeing the 7th prize: $1.5k. Since this was a break-even month for me, I would have to cash in some of my FPPs to get the $1.6k bonus in order to pay the bills while leaving my banrkoll untouched. That 7th prize would solve the problem and let me keep my points for later. That's why it looked so yummy!

The wait to get to the final table was excruciating. I had a very good stack and just had to wait for one of the shorties to bust. It took some time but we finally got there! I was around 4th to 6th in chips most of the time and it didn't take long before 2 players were eliminated! When I realized that I was guaranteed to get at least the 7th prize I was over the moon! Grinning to myself, I took a sip of my coffee and watched as a player that had more chips than me got all-in against the chip leader. He got eliminated, taking us one step higher in the paying ladder. I'm telling you, those were the easiest 500 bucks I've ever made. Staring at my computer screen while drinking coffee.

I finished the tournament in 4th place, cashing in $3.6k. Awesome! I got a bit unlucky at the last hand where I got all-in preflop with 55 against ATs. It's a coin flip slightly tipped in my favor and for a moment there I thought I'd get it, until an ace hit on the river (it always has to be the damn river, right?). You can see the full hand here.

I felt a slight disappointment for losing that hand but it was momentary. I was too busy being happy about the $3.6k that literally came out of nowhere to save the day! :D And if I'm not mistaken, this is my best score at MTTs, my second best being a $3k finish last December at a $109 NL tourney.

After the MTT finished around 20:00, I was still missing something like 50 VPPs for the Supernova threshold. The $12 being long gone, I could either play higher or lower. I decided I didn't want to challenge my luck at the higher buy-ins so I loaded up some $3.75s to make the missing points. You know I love to share unusual graphs, so here's mine from yesterday:

Haha! Cool or what? Anyway, I hope I'll be more focused during October. It's going to be a challenging month because André has decided to do the vampire schedule which means he'll be waking up around 14.00 everyday. I want to keep my morning routine, ideally waking up at 7.30-8.00 which is gonna be tough because we'll be living in the same house without seeing each other much. I'm not entirely sure how this is going to work out. From past experience, I know that us having opposite schedules does not work very well. One of us always ends up following the other's schedule. Only this time it will be really tough because I have better games in the morning while André has better games at night. We'll see how this goes...

Until my next post, see you guys at the tables! :)