Satellites and the big score...

I was reading SG's blog the other day (see link to right) and he was talking about how he grinds away in STT's and cash games and looks to give a big boost to his bankroll by finishing well in a MTT. Now this is basically what I have been doing for the last couple of years, playing $5/$10 MTT's on the side looking for that big win. However, what SG looks to do is satellite into bigger buy-in tournies which makes alot of sense.

So I enter a $4 rebuy turbo satellite to a $55 13k guarenteed tourney and lo and behold qualify comfortably! When I play rebuys online I usually limit myself to an immediate rebuy if there's one available and an add-on at the end of the rebuy period. In this particular satellite I have an outlay of $8 max and therefore only have to qualify once in 7 attempts to make it profitable.

So to the $55 tourney and it was a story of making the big hands pay. The big hands being aces, which I got 3 times in the first 2 hours, doubling up each time I had them. The other playable hands I had were AK, which I had 5 times in the first hour! I broke even on these AK's, winning 3 small pots, losing a small one and losing a medium one when I ran into aces luckily on a scary board. After the second break however the cards just dried up, I had about 25bb's at one stage but this was whittled down to 10bb's, with stealing and restealing opportunities very limited in what was a very aggressive tournament. Then UTG pumps it to 3xbb, I look at QQ in late position and push over the top and get called by the UTG player who had AQ and spiked an Ace on the turn to send me packing in 41st out of 220 with 30 getting paid. A shame as I think winning that hand would have pretty much guarenteed a cash at my first attempt in this level of tournament. One thing I noticed when playing this tournament was the number of bad, and I mean very bad, players. I'm talking about things like min-raising from the button when there have been 3 limpers in front, calling pot-sized all-ins on the turn with bare flush draws it was almost embarassing at times. I was paying full attention to this tournament and making notes on each player categorising them into "bad/rubbish/solid/tricky" and then making notes of how they played particular hands, something I would definately recommend doing, especially at this sort of level and below when it is very rare that someone will mix up their game meaning that you can pretty much guess their hand by looking back at betting patterns. Obviously this is a very simplistic view with rising blind levels greatly changing the dynamics of play but it certainly helped me and also made sure I kept concentrating.

Anyway on my first table I made notes on all the players and I categorised just one as "solid", one as "tricky" and the rest were either "rubbish" or "bad" and I was loving it. Unfortunately I got moved from this table to one with a slightly better standard but still nothing special and my first impressions are certainly that I can make this a profitable tournament for myself, especially if I can keep qualifying for so little. I tried qualifying from the same rebuy on Friday night and finished 9th with the top 8 getting seats having seen 4 short stacks be all-in before me with the worst hand and suck out, it was sickening to watch as I knew what was coming...


ps. Get in there Tottenham...5-1...Spurs are on their way to Wembley, Tottenham's gonnna do it again...(The Cannon will appreciate that I'm sure).