Who are you and why are you playing my Full Tilt account?

That's kinda what I have to ask after this weekend. I know $400 isn't a huge score by even my standards, much less the standards of people who actually play online tournaments routinely, but this run was pretty good in my less-than-humble opinion.

5 tournaments played
4 cashes
3 final tables
1 5th-place finish
1 3rd-place finish
1 2nd-place finish

No, I didn't actually win any of these tournaments, but I can't remember the last time I actually played 5 MTTs in a month, much less a weekend. And I certainly can't remember the last time I cashed in more than one MTT in a month.

Saturday evening I was hanging out finishing my articles for PokerNews and the PokerStars blog, and Suzy was watching some chick flick on TV that I wasn't interested in being a party to, so I looked around at FTP to see what was going on. I found a $3 NLHE tourney about to happen and a Pot Limit HA Tourney (1/2 Pot Limit Hold'em, 1/2 Pot Limit Omaha). I signed up for both of them, with a total investment of $8.80. Given that I had a little less than $60 in my Full Tilt account, that was about all I was willing to spend. I then kicked back with a new collected graphic novel (X-Men: House of M) and generally ignored the game unless I picked up a big starting hand.

Really, before I knew what had happened, one of the tourneys was on break, and I was floating around average chip stacks in both events. I hadn't gotten the start times quite right, so they didn't both go on break at the same time, but that was my only complaint. I don't really remember too much about anything, just winning a few coin flips when the blinds got high, and then realizing that I had busted in 30-something in the NLHE event and that I was at the final table of the HA tourney. Cool, I'd forgotten about the changing background when you get to the final table. No really, I had. It's been that long. There weren't a ton of players in the HA tourney, so 5th place only got me about $44, but adding that to the $6 I got out of the NLHE tourney I had doubled my FTP account in a few short hours. Felt good to get on that horse and actually ride for a while instead of just getting kicked in the head. And boy, the low buy-in tournaments have some abominable play.

Tomorrow, we'll look at my much more succesful run on Sunday afternoon, but for now, here's your poker tip of the day, brought to you by me and our friends at Bodog - Omaha is hard. Four tables of Omaha is four times as hard. And if you see me online at a cash table. just get in line, there's money being given away. I donked off about $30 Sunday afternoon playing O8 before I realized that I was playing too fast, too many hands, too irritated, too sober and about 7 more "toos." So play fewer tables to reduce your toos.

Two more days of the day job before Suzy and I drive north for the Bash. If they're all like today, I'm moving in with Al.