New A-lister here, never used the same-day standby benefit before. My wife is designated as my companion and we're scheduled to fly on a nonstop from MDW-SMF. There's a flight leaving earlier in the day we'd prefer to take that routes MDW-DEN-SMF. I assume we would need to fly standby on both segments, is that correct? If so, it sounds like there's the possibility that we could make it to DEN but not all the way to SMF that day.

Does anybody have any experience doing this same thing?