Sometimes it goes right

After my "man, I suck" realizations, I considered that I seem to do all right in cheap Sit and Go tournaments. Probably because my tournament play is okay in small doses, before I get bored and distracted enough to do something stupid.

I should check my PokerTracker stats to confirm this, but so far the Tournament section of PokerTracker is unknown territory to me. Uh oh, will I have to actually RTFM?

So I tried a couple of $5 SNGs on Full Tilt to test my hypothesis that I might not suck at them. I distractedly played in one while on one or two $50NL tables, folding all but the best hands and playing those straightforwardly. One moment I looked down and I was in third. I'm not quite sure how it happened. I was the short stack and made a play and missed shortly after, but at least I made the money. Too bad I don't remember it.

I tried another yesterday, and finished second. Again, I didn't try anything fancy, just waited for good cards and played aggressively when I got them. I was also in a two-table SNG at the same time so was again distracted, but the two games kept me busy and prevented boredom. The single table game played out much the same down to four players, where I found myself with a reasonable stack, tied for second. We fought on the bubble for a long time, partly because the table's big stack wasn't (IMHO) putting enough pressure on the fourth place short stack to knock him out. So I took up the slack, and kept raising his blinds and stole a fair amount off of him until he started pushing back.

Eventually we knocked him out and the next player, and I found myself heads up with the chipleader. We fought back and forth for what must have been 30-40 minutes, chips flowing between us as I took the lead and relinquished it more than once. We seemed about evenly matched, and the cards and suckouts favored us both pretty equally. I was thoroughly enjoying myself, and the other guy seemed to be having a good time too. We started chatting about headsup play and the 18K tournament he was in at the same time, and when eventually he caught me with a King high to his Ace, paired it and busted me out, we complimented each other on a game well played.

Games like that are a pleasure to play. I should try the SNG thing more often, especially if I'm often in the money.

Edit: Oh yeah, for full disclosure I should state that I busted out early (relatively speaking) of the two-table SNG. It was nearly an hour into the game, I was fighting on the bubble on the one-table and basically decided it wasn't worth my attention, so did something stupid and got knocked out.

Yes, that probably summarizes my problem right there.