I placed 8th out of 839 runners in a $3.30 MTT tourney on FTP last night. It took 4.5 hours to get there, but I cashed with a not too shabby, but far from awesome, $54.11. The payouts are insanely top weighted, but I still managed to make 16.4 times my buy-in, an accomplishment in any measure. I really wanted to make the final table here and I got tripped up when I got raised on the button by a LAG player whom I'd seen call off a third of his large stack with KTo. He raised to $20,000 on the button, with blinds at $4,000/$8,000 and antes at $1,000. I was in the BB with KQo. This was a 6-handed tourney (something I'm even more proud of because I normally don't do well with high aggression games), so KQ is definitely something I can race with short handed. I pushed for $140,000, hoping to double through a light call or even willing to race against a small pair, but he quick-called with AK and I was toast. Other than that mistake, I played pretty well. I was frustrated when one of the weaker players at the table managed to fol PF 4 different times against me when I re-raised him with KK or AA (!). Not once did he come over the top with his original raise. All the time, he was min-raising and it was too dangerous for me to flat call, so I made a small re-raise and he folded. Every time. Four times! These hands don't come easily, so it hurts not to get paid off on them.
Towards the end, I could feel my lack of aggression starting to hurt me, as my blinds got stolen more frequently in short handed play. Most of the game towards the end was PF play, so I have to work on my aggression to finish off these deep runs I make. Otherwise, I'm never going to make the big money.
6 comments:
Congrats on the cash.
$12.02/hr < 2x ny min. wage
"Most of the game towards the end was PF play, so I have to work on my aggression to finish off these deep runs I make."
This is hard to explain in a comment, but one thing I've noticed is that when the blinds get high enough, you don't need to make your raises three times the big blind. A simple min-raise (or just a little more than that) works just as well. The reason is that it will be so much that the others won't play a hand unless they have something. You pick up the blinds and antes with A-J, K-J, A-10 and similar crap hands. I'm not sure why it works, but it does in the cheap tournaments.
Of course, for this to be effective, you have to make the same raise with a good hand.
@Anonymous - Never has a dumber comment been left on my blog. Are you insinuating that I shouldn't play a poker tournament unless I can make enough to become a professional player? Would you care to enlighten me as to the threshold this would entail? And please, tell me about your own professional career playing poker. I assume you're a pro player, right? I mean, you don't work for a living at a bank or anything.
I love that cheerleader is catching on! Gimme a nickel.
Anonymous' comment is so cheerleader.
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