Grand Adventure

Played in two tournaments tonight. Both No Limit Hold Em (NLHE). As I’ve posted before, I have an affinity for 2-7 Single Draw but it’s darn hard to find a Sit-n-Go match (short tourn format, 1-multiple tables that start when filled). Not for the buy ins I want.

So, I usually play one to three of the .10 multi-table tournaments (MTT) for NLHE. They start about every 10 mins depending on how many people are online. The skill level varies, but mostly beginner level until about 2/3 of the players are cleared. This is fine by me. I’ve placed in the money a few times (about 1 in 10) and even made it to the final table bowing out at 5th place (for a $2.20 payout). Lest this impress you, Brady has placed first in a MTT clearing almost 6 times that. Considering he is playing with Pokerstars.com’s money, that’s truly truly cool.

I had played one time before the .02 (yep, that’s two cents) game. What a hoot! The format is referred to as “hyper-turbo”. In regular mode the blinds move up a relatively stately 10 mins. This favors tighter play especially in the beginning of the tournament when your chip equity is such that a preflop all-in that may lose your stack is just plain dumb. Better to wait until you have an absolute premium hand to make your move. When you play turbo mode, the blinds bump every 5 mins. That’s the normal mode I play in because the rake the house takes is much lower for the S&Gs…you pay more to have more time to analyze your hand. These tournaments can take 3-4 hours to get to the final table and finish things out.

So, tonight to pass the time during the wait for good hands in a .10 MTT I played in the hyper-turbo .02 MTT. 990 players to start, only $500 in chips and the blinds start off at 25/50 so your stack gets whomped hard early and the pace never lets up because the blinds double every *3* minutes. The strategy for this game is simple: you are hyper aggressive to go with the hyper-turbo. If you don’t double up in a few hands you will face a sure increase in the blinds. You must double up again soon after that. And the antes kick in crazy early. It makes pot stealing moves a must, but you essentially have to go all in to do so because everybody else is just as deparate. The last piece of the strategy is blind dumb luck. Playing this aggressively means you are making big moves with medium to weak hands most of the time. And praying to hit any sort of piece of the board to improve your chip stack.

I won’t give a play by play but suffice to say I won the hands I needed to…until the very last one of course. Out of 990 players I took second and earned $3.30 for my effort. Screenshot below:

The first time I played I didn’t like the pacing. Too frantic, and the obvious issue of needing a bit o’ luck to build enough chips to play “normally” somewhat. I only got a reprieve for about 5 mins of the whole hour the tournament took not counting the scheduled break at :55 of the hour. Although its easy for me to say I now like this format (which is only partially true) since I won money tonight I will probably play it again in the future. It’s a laughable two cents to play, but I recommend you don’t build too many habits by playing this tournament format much. Too fast, unrealistic card selection is common and necessary.

The sure thing is that you won’t be playing this MTT very long because of the insane pace and how the pot builds just from antes and huge blinds.

The final guy and I had about 500,000 in chips between us. During heads up the lead changed twice then he hit his cards when I made a move. Heads up is like that, and you can’t be timid when you have a bettable hand or you’ll get butt handed to you. Since there was over $70k in chips in the pot before the betting even started when we were heads up you should think about playing any two cards and only fold the dogs.

It’s back to the cash tables for me for a bit. The pacing there is MUCH more to my liking. But I had fun tonight. (If you wonder how I did in the .10 tournament: I missed the money by one place. That’s called being the “Bubble Boy”. That’s poker. I more than made up the difference from the measly .02 tournament!)