I began the second day of Festa al Lago's $15k WPT event with 58k @ 600/1200, and arrived to find about as soft of a table draw as I could ask for on day two of this particular tournament.

In fact, the pittsy calling station that Paul Wasicka had been telling me about hands with the night before was conveniently located on my left!

I was able to chip up a bit when the station, who was a really nice older businessman, chased the nut flush draw against my top pair/top kicker and bricked. But, sadly, they broke my table about a level into play.

Even more sadly, I arrived at my new table to find some VERY familiar faces: Marco "CrazyMarco/NoraFlum" Johnson, Steven "MrTimCaum" O'Dwyer, Barry Greenstein, and Phil Ivey. I was definitely not happy with my new table, even with a few soft spots to my left.

Not what you want to see when you look across the table.

However, I managed to respond to the challenge by really striving to play my A game all day. I would really only give myself a B+ yesterday, but can honestly say that I'm really happy with the way I played almost every had today ... even the ones I lost.

I managed to avoid playing big pots for most of the day, and was not all in once. I won a race to eliminate O'Dwyer with 9♠ 9♥ against his A♣ Q♦ for his last 16k after what seemed to be a pretty brutal day for him ... seated directly to Ivey's right.

The only other time I had a player all in was when I coolered the crap out of one of the older gentlemen seated on my left. I flopped the nut flush with A♦ 5♦ on a 4♦ 6♦ 8♦ flop, and it obviously didn't take long to build a pot of 140k with him holding the Q♦ T♦!!!

I spent the rest of the day chipping away slowly, mostly at the other players at the table. I had to play back at Barry and Phil a bit as well since they were opening so many pots in front of me, but getting way out of line and trying to run them over was not going to be part of my game plan. Just had to make sure we all got to share the wealth! =)

With 98 players remaining and an average stack of ~165k, I have 204,500 going to 1,200/2,400 (300). If I can keep playing at the level I played today and I don't get unlucky I really like my chances at the $1.2 million first prize ...

Matt Stout