After six hours of night sleep I was ready for day 2, which I started with 21BB - in other words a perfect resteal stack. I looked at the table draw and recognized various pros in my table, for example Finnish PLO/MTT player Matias Knaapinen who has recently been final tabling every tournament he's played. I figured action would be quite aggressive in our table and had the plan of resteal shoving very very light when I thought the spot was right.

Nothing really went according to my plans in the beginning of day 2 either, but this time in a good way. I folded the first five or six hands. In the last one a Finnish-Vietnamese tourney regular who I think is kind of bad (tilts easily and then spazzes off chips) lost half his stack in a standard AK>QQ coinflip. The king came on the river and I could just see it in his eyes how tilted he was. In the very next hand he shoved his last 13BB from MP2 and I made a relatively standard reshove with A9s from the hijack for my 20BB. Everyone else folded. I was actually against a legitimate hand as he held KQ, but I held and lifted my stack to 30k.

A few hands later a random Finnish guy who I've never seen opens UTG for 2,5BB with a 25BB stack, I look at QQ in UTG+1 and raise to 6,5BB. Folded around to him, he thinks about it for maybe 5 seconds and 4bet shoves with 99. I snap and hold. I'm never 3-betting worse than 99 (except for AK) so I think his push was pretty bad, but then again we've never played each other before so maybe he saw the situation a bit differently. After this hand I all of a sudden had 40k and was nicely above average.

A couple of orbits later a Lithuanian guy who had just finished 3rd in the 10k EPT final in Monte Carlo for 700k€ was brought directly to my left side with a chiplead stack - about 100k I believe when the average at the time was only 30k or so. He seemed a bit cocky at first (but turned out to be a really nice guy) and he played 40-50% of hands from the start trying to run the table over. Sometimes I'd try to start 3-betting him right away to stop him from doing his thing, but since the blinds very still relatively low compared to my stack I decided to build a tight image for a while and go after him later when there's actually value in winning his opens.

I don't think anything too interesting happened for the next 1,5 hours or so. Whenever the Lithuanian guy (his nickname was Domcee, so let's call him that from now on) didn't raise I did my best to steal blinds, and most of the time I let him get away with it when he raised. At some point I knocked out Finnish pro Mika Paasonen in a standard blind vs blind situation where he shoved SB for 12BB and I only had to look at one card (A) before making the call. My A7 held against his J5 and I gained some more chips. Around this time I also started 3-betting Domcee really light. I did have AA against him once in a spot where he raised in the hijack and I 3-bet him in the CO. He snap folded which kind of sucked. The very next orbit in the exact same positions he again raised in the hijack and I decided to 3bet him without even looking at my cards. The thing is that against a random 3betting J4o is really bad here if you've just 3bet him, as he's giving you less credit the second time. However my perception of Domcee was that he was on a higher level than this and definitely realised that I'd need a super strong hand to do it again just an orbit later. We also had very lucrative 42BB stacks which meant that he couldn't flat call and a 4bet bluff would be suicidal, so he pretty much would have to fold everything except monsters. He thought about it for a while and folded AJs face up. I think his fold is really standard against my image at the time but it also points out that I leveled him just right.

I grinded more and more chips and managed to run the table over a bit after all the Finns had been knocked out and replaced by satellite qualifiers who appeared kind of scared. I ran pretty good overall and got paid whenever I bet for value and got folded every time I bluffed people. It was a mixture of running well and playing well which led to me covering the table by a big margin when the bubble arrived (Domcee had been transfered to a different table). As I was getting ready to increase my pre-flop raise percentage to 100 a really good Polish player with a 20BB stack was moved to my immediate left. He clearly noticed what was going on, and started 3bet shoving over my opens. I had to fold my junk every time and finally decrease my opening frequency. Luckily the bubble bursted pretty quickly and we were down to 26 players. After the bubble I was still in the top 5 stacks despite being owned by the Polish guy a bit.

According to the schedule the play would stop with 18 players left. When we were down to 21 or so I again started relying on people being scared, desperately wanting to make it into day three. I made a pretty bad bluffing attempt trying to take advantage of this. I won't say more, but the hand included me opening 52o UTG, floating with 5 high and attempting a crazy reraise bluff on the turn. Oops. After this I was down to about average, but was able to get a hold of myself immediately to prevent further damage. I patiently folded around for a while being card dead, then called someone's resteal shove with 88 and was lucky enough to be against 66. I held and ended the day with 200k with only 18 players left, which meant I'd be in the third place going into day three.