Yes!

Yesterday, around 6:30 at night, I decided to jump into a random Ultimate Bet freeroll. I didn't have any money on the site and I just felt like playing on it for some reason. It turned out being Omaha hi/lo, which was fortunate, because it's one of my favorite types of poker and the general population of UB freerollers tends to be even worse at it than other games.

It started out pretty crazily. People were going all in left and right on next to nothing, even after the flop or turn, and I was just folding my mediocre hands and waiting for the madness to die down. It took a while - I think it was at least fourty minutes into the tournament before I won my first hand, and then another ten for the next one - but those were the first two hands I brought to the showdown, and I had nearly quadrupled my initial stack afterwards, bringing me up to around 5500.

After that, I continued to play ultra-tight and wait for good hands. People were paying off just about anything that I would catch, so it wasn't challenging. Eventually, at the first break, I was somewhere in the vicinity of 8000 chips.

Sadly, I had to leave for a while at that point. I spent around an hour away from the game, came back to see that I was still at 7000 or so chips, played a hand or so, and then had to go right back to sitting out while I had to do some work. When I came back again, just to check on my stack, I was around 6000. I decided to just find a good hand preflop and push it all in, because I wasn't going to be able to play out the rest of the tournament.

Well, I did that. Twice. And I ended up at 50k chips after all was said and done. Now, that wasn't all that huge by this stage of the tourney, but it wasn't half bad. And, having obtained a chipstack that could hold on for a while, I proceed to go back to my work and sit out again.

I sat back down to finish the tournament once and for all a half an hour or so later. My chip stack was still fine, though I don't remember what it was exactly. To be honest, I don't remember much about this stage of the tournament. When it got down to around 50 people, though, I was in 30th or so and the top 30 places paid off with an entry into a much better 'round II' freeroll on sunday. I was a bit worried that I'd bubble, but I hung on with a combination of playing really tight and occasionally making plays for chips, and in the end I scraped by and made it into the top 30. I was 26th or so at the time.

The next payout was that there was $50 distributed amongst the top 18. I started playing some real poker again, rather than my too-tight don't let me bubble style that I'd been playing before, and pulled my self up just enough to pull into the money again - but I was in second to last place.

Well, long story short, I went all in a few times and was up to 200k, then 500k, and then the next thing you know I'm at the final table. I don't remember much of this anymore, honestly, because it was past midnight and I was tired as hell.

I ended up placing 3rd. It's my best mtt finish ever, so I'm proud of it. Sure, it was a freeroll, but there were still 3863 people for me to outlast, so it wasn't easy.

I made all of $6 and the entry to the other freeroll as a prize. $1 an hour, woo. Still, it was fun. Incidentally, I had incredible luck all tournament. Not tons of suckouts kind of luck, but every single 50-50 race going my way kind of luck. That doesn't happen too often, so it's always refreshing when it does.

Today, I played a few $1.10 triple draw sit n gos on pokerstars for a stake from neverbeg.com, and placed 2nd/1st/2nd - so the good streak continues. Hopefully it'll never end.

...Yeah, right.