Won a Seat to Paradise!

I had a good Sunday yesterday - finally. I've been making the money with a good frequency recently on Sundays but keeping finishing a hand or two away from the really big money. Yesterday I turned that around by winning a $12K package to Paradise Island this Sunday. I've been wanting to play that tournament the last few years and could never work it into my schedule so I am excited to be going. I've done several cruises and Aruba a couple of times but never PokerStars biggest event in the Bahamas. Should be a lot of fun and hopefully I'll turn my entry into some real big bucks.

The satellite was a $650 entry fee with about 350 entrants. They gave away 17 seats. Strategy in a satellite becomes very different when you start getting close to the seats. If you have a good stack, you might sometimes fold AA before the flop as there is no reason to keep playing. This makes the whole dynamics of the hands quite interesting as the short stacks who need chips often do not meet a lot of resistance since the bigger stacks don't want to risk chips trying to break them. From a strategical perspective, you are always asking, when do I need to take some chances and when shouldn't I? I hovered around 10th to 14th place for most of the time while we went from 35 to 17 players, so I basically didn't play many hands, but did have to play some here and there to make sure the blinds and antes didn't dwindle my chips down. I folded AQ once from early position which was really not a difficult decision. I got dealt AA in the big blind and normally you would love that, but it actually wasn't ideal because even AA can lose if I get involved in a big pot. For example, someone raises, I push allin, and he calls with KK - if he hits a K I am not one of the shorter stacks or possibly even out. You actually don't want to take chances in a satellite when you don't need to. It turns out that the small blind made a mini-raise and I knew he was weak so I just pushed all-in. I had another tricky situation with AKs in the small blind. I needed the blinds and antes to feel more comfortable with my stack, but at the same time wasn't crazy about risking a lot of chips since I was about 13th in chips at the time. I made a raise and fortunately wasn't faced with a tough decision as my opponent folded.

I played nine tournaments yesterday which seems to be my normal Sunday total. I cashed in one other event, although I must say I wasn't very focused on it as the satellite winded down to the final seats. A little disappointing that I didn't give that tournament the attention it deserved but at least I cashed.

So two cashes, but one nice one to make up for some of my recent Sunday losses. See you in Paradise!