Last night was my last large field session prior to the start of the Mini UBOC on Sunday and I have to say that I found some confidence in a strange place. What exactly do I mean by that, well I had spent the evening bricking most stuff which seems to be the order of the day of late, but fine no big deal. Mostly losing a lot of races (AK is not high on my friend list at the moment), but not playing poorly. I managed a 9th place finish in the $16.50 Deep Stack event on AP which made me feel pretty good going into the weekend, but what really got me feeling good was my result in a 4.40 2R1A on Pokerstars. There were 171 runners in this event (which I love to play in btw, deep stack small field, so much fun) and my end result was 31, just 4 from the money but how I got there was really the great part. At around 76 runners left I took a beat and dropped to just a little over 10bb's. Sitting at 74/76 I had 2 choices.
1. Feel sorry for myself and do something stupid and exit the tourney.
2. Fight back
I chose option 2. From there I shoved (and I'll admit got very lucky on an A7 vs. AJ shove), raise and 3bet my way back to 30bbs and a solid stack, before taking one more beat in the 40's which dropped me to 1bb. Once again, had to revisit my two options. What did I do, fought and fought hard. Managed to recover back to 15bbs and then lost a race to go out in 31. What makes me feel so good about this is that I really had no right to comeback and make it this much farther, but I did. I found 40+ additional places and almost turned a dismal affair into something excellent. I am not thrilled I didn't at least cash, but that isn't really here nor there on this one. The fact that I managed to take 2 beats, cripple my stack and effectively recover myself and continue to play. This is the sort of stuff that makes a player dangerous. When you can do things like this a feeling of near invincibility starts to take over. I don't mean that you play wrecklessly, but knowing that you can grow a stack, get crippled and rebuild is a powerful feeling. I can't tell you how glad I am that this happened. The energy it has given me feels really good. My excitement for the weekend has increased because I feel stronger at the table, that when I am there and mentally engaged and focused that I am very hard to beat and very difficult to eliminate. I love this feeling!