It was a mixed bag of a night.

The evening started off with the sixteenth tournament in my local series. The hands I was dealt were not particularly good and my stack was eaten slowly away. The second hand after I was moved to the other table to replace a bust-out I was felted when my AK was outdrawn by a KQ. I went through those chips as well, forcing a second re-buy before we consolidated to the final table. After that, though, I started to pick up some hands and accumulate chips, knocking out five of the original eleven players. Came up in second place, which meant that not only did I win enough to cover my buy-ins and add-on but I actually extended my point lead for the Player of the Year somewhat (though the second of the quarterly double-point events coming up may eradicate that). I’ve been in the lead (or tied for it) for seven events now, since the middle of October.

Then I messed up in a PokerStars Aussie Millions satellite. I was doing far better than I expected; the satellites have unlimited re-buys for an hour and I not only didn’t re-buy but at the add-on time I maintained a position about 23rd in the field without that, either. As the field narrowed down to about 30 remaining entries (133 originally, with 201 re-buys and 85 add-ons), I was in 2nd position with about 40K in chips. The prize pool was large enough that the top eleven spots were going to get tickets to the $530 qualifier tournament and 12th place would get $455. I was sitting pretty. Except that I refused to sit and soon I was bleeding chips. The blinds, admittedly, were taking chunks out of my stack at 400/800/75, and with more than an hour to go I couldn’t just sit there and glide into the money, but I played it poorly after the having worked my way up from a 1.5K starting stack.