Bittersweet biggish cash

It's been awhile since I've updated, but not much has changed. I still haven't tested for PTQs even though they start next weekend, but I've played some limited with Conflux and a decent amount of poker.

I went to the Conflux prerelease and went 2-2. My rares weren't that great, and neither was my manafixing. I had a Sigil of Distinction, but my other rares were pretty unspectacular. A couple of nights later we did a six-man 3v3 team draft, just playing for the rares. We only had enough packs to do SCC, so that's what we did. I firstpicked Resounding Thunder, got passed a Jungle Shrine, Wild Nacatl, then another Jungle Shrine and wound up the pack with some other animals, Resounding Roar, and Esper and Jund Panoramas. I was planning on being straight Naya going into Conflux, but there aren't really enough animals to make that worthwhile, especially with the manafixing. Instead I ended up 5c Naya-based with 4 (!) Matca Rioters and 2 Paragon of the Amesha, plus Fiery Fall, Exploding Borders, and a Charnelhoard Wurm to top it off. I only had one maindeck two-drop creature to go with 2 Kaleidostones, but that was fine since my 3-drops were so good.

The games were pretty uneventful and I 3-0, 6-0ed the draft. Having your Matca Rioters and Charnelhoard Wurm given first strike via Rakeclaw Gargantuan is pretty unfair. The four nonbasics I picked up early allowed me to play one of each basic land and still have really good mana.

On the poker front it's been a wild week. After I requested my weekly paycheck last Friday (the 6th) I decided to try to have a big week and put in quite a few hours over the weekend. Unfortunately I played pretty badly and ran worse and ended up stuck a couple hundred bucks. I tend to exercise avoidance to adverse situations, so I didn't put in many hours Monday through Thursday, and the hours I did put in were scattered about cash games and tournaments, which didn't bear much fruit. Fast forward to yesterday and I'm stuck about $500 for the week and planning ways to mise for the next couple of weeks until I can make back enough to pay myself. I enter a round of 4 Sit-N-Gos and things go fairly well, so I decide to try a handful of MTTs again. Four hours later I'm at the final table of the $26-buyin $12.5k guaranteed with 60% of the chips in play. Depressingly enough, I went for the win instead of trying to just move up to second (which would have been very easy) and ended up busting out in 4th, good for $1300. It sucks to run so hot and get so close to winning a big one and fall short. For the record, 1st would have been $3600 and 2nd was $2300. When you take a step back though, it's a lot of money to me right now and I really needed it.

Strategically, I didn't really do anything differently than I usually do. I just tried to play tight when my table was active and capitalize when I thought I had a good seat to steal blinds. I won a big coinflip with AJo vs A8o vs TT after we were in the money which sent me up to 2nd in chips, and I was able to bully the table and run hot in coinflips to stay in 2nd for the final table. Once there I turned a straight against the other chipleader and took the massive chiplead. I think my downfall included me getting bluffed out of a big pot, but I'll never know.

I'm back to playing a bunch of MTTs today. Seems like a solid plan for the time being. Wish me luck.