I'm in!!! Or so I thought...

As I mentioned in my previous post, FTOPS IV will be starting in May and I personally like this tournament series. Though I'm definitely donkish in tournaments, I still enjoy them and so FTOPS is always something that try to qualify for as many events. However, I tend to be picky about tournament selection. In other words, I don't just randomly choose satellite tournaments. Rather, I try to find one that may have an overlay or one that seems like the ratio of winner vs # of runners is relatively small (like if only 1 per 20 entrants get in, that's not so good... but 1 in 7 or 8, not so bad). So tonight, I was gonna take a break from cash games anyways and maybe try to satellite into a FTOPS event... and I found one that I thought was ok. $24+2 buy-in, winner gets an entry and when I registered, there were only 7 players... it ended up with 12, so winner gets an entry to the $200+16 tournament and the second place gets $74.

Now here's where I'm supposed to tell you how I awesomely took down this tournament with well timed aggression, smart lay downs, etc... but that's not my style, nor does that happen often. However, I am happy to say that I took this baby down! I was fortunate in that I was to the left of an uber aggressive player (could be a blogger and wouldn't surprise me) and though he was clearly getting out of line, I held my ground, played my style of poker and also got some decent cards at the right time. Eventually, I thought I was gonna go heads up with him when he busted out on a nasty beat. Fortunate for me since the only other guy remaining was not all that great. I'm certainly not a great heads up player but this guy was pretty easy to pick off. After I had him crippled, he doubled up through me on a lucky river but in the end, I flopped a straight, slowplayed it until he caught a third 7 on the river, raised me and I put him all in.



It's rare that I get this screen/message so I'm pumping my fist in the air, enjoying my proud moment (funny how I wouldn't think twice about losing or winning $200 in a cash game but when you win a tournament, it feels so good!).



So then I'm capturing the screen to make sure I can blog (read brag) about it.



Until I realize, what you may have noticed by now (if you actually clicked on the pic above and saw the tournament lobby pic)... It says super satellite... wtf... $200+16 is a perfectly normal buy-in for a FTOPS event so I didn't even think twice. But a super satellite generally means it's a satellite to another satellite... sure enough, this was a super satellite to the FTOPS IV event #4 which is a $1000+60 buy-in event (largest online buy-in I've ever heard of for a MTT)... so, what does this win get me? It gets me a chance to compete in the satellite for the $1000+60... now granted, that's certainly a format I like (since it's a $216 buy-in, 1 out of every 5 contestants will win a seat to the $1000+60 event) and so I'm glad that I got to satellite into that one for $24... but still... I shoulda paid attention to what I was getting... I have to play in another tourney, just to qualify for the event I want to play in... oh well, a little damper but still doesn't take away from the win!