Life Of A Miner

In a brief run yesterday (just over 100 hands), I had an absurd run of setting up with pocket pairs. Set mining can pay such nice dividends. Over the stretch, I picked up 11 PPs, and had made a set in 6 of them by the end of the hand. I lost two of those sets - one where I played right into the hands of someone who had flopped a boat, leading the flop then getting all excited when my deuces made a set on the turn; the other all-in PF, hitting a set of 8s after my opponent had already made a set of 10s. But generally I was playing badly, and getting rewarded with the deck in my face. Can't forget about runs like that when everything starts to turn the other way. So there, I wrote it, and you can point me back to this paragraph when I start whining about not catching anything some time in the future.

So I finished my token challenge. 10 $8-$0.80 2-table tourneys, playing my way up the token tiers. And it ended up like this:
10 tier ones -> 4 tier twos ($26 tokens)
4 tier twos -> 2 tier threes ($75 tokens)
2 tier twos -> $124 cash & $216 in tourney dollars

The two $75 token events turned out nicely. In the second, I played a satellite to the $750K Guarantee, paying 3 spots out of 9 with an entry. I didn't make any noise in the early stages and drifted down to 700 chips, then started pushing left and right, and felt Fortune shine ever so brightly on me, with the following succession of all-in wins:

A6 > Q3 (up to 2000)
10J > 99 (up to 2400)
99 <>88 > AQ (up to 4000)
AK > 28 (up to 4200)

3 of those were chances to get sent home, and I pulled through them all. The key to this challenge was

1) how poor some of the play is early on the 1st and 2nd tier events

2) how many of the players have a poor understanding of how to play low-M (high blinds) tournament poker.

It can be a lucrative little experiment...I suggest trying it out.