Getting back some confidence

Although I didn't win much and missed the FTOPS seat last night my confidence started to grow again. It's amazing how a downswing can destroy the confidence in your own ability and game plan. You start to question moves that are good and worked out in the past just because you lost a few of those hands in key situations.

By chance I found an interesting tournament at Pokerstars. The Wednesday 3pm (EST) $50+5 not only has a $25,000 guarantee. It also has 15 min. blindlevels and 3,000 starting chips. That's makes it a deep stack tournament equal to the FullTilt deep stacks. Therefore I allowed myself to play that one and add it to the DS challenge in my stats. The tournament had 869 players creating a prize pool of $43,450 (and a first prize of more than $9,000).

135 players got paid and I was able to limp into the money severly shortstacked. From there I used some well selected all-ins to stay into the game. Most of them weren't called and I survived the others. It's amazing which hands people think are worth to call an all-in from a stack with 10 big blinds left. But finally I ran into AA with an A8 of diamonds. But I made it to a good 43rd place for a $152.08 payday. With a little more luck it could have been even more - but what counts here most is the good result in general and the confidence in my game plan that has come back!

Oh, and in another satellite tournament I had a real curious hand: I was shortstacked and raised all-in with 89s. One caller with JJ. Flop came 567 (exactly in that order). Turn was a five ... and River was ... another five. Ouch!