Aggression Early in Tournaments
When reviewing my recent tournament results, I have noticed that I often plod along with a short stack through about 3/4 of the field, only to be eliminated right before or on the bubble. I have come to the conclusion that perhaps I am not playing aggresive enough early in the tournaments. You need to accumulate chips in order to win, and I think I have been too concerned with preservation, and not enough with accumulation.
Here is an example. Let' s say it is a 180 person s&g on stars. I have T 1300. Blinds are at 25/50. I open in middle position for 150, and the button pushes all in for T1200. What hands do I call with here? Generally, I would only call with AA, KK, QQ, AK, and maybe JJ. Now, I am thinking maybe I need to take a few more chances early on, so as to be able to use my increased chip stack later in the tournament. The question is, how far should I take this?
TT seems ok, but what about 99? AQ? 88?
Any thoughts?
posted by Gabe @ 8:41 AM
1 Comments:
This is probably the hardest part of tournaments. Do you fight to accumulate or do you "pick a better spot?"
The answer lies in the middle. With >=99, unless a read indicates otherwise, I'm probably picking a better spot.
Another important thing is to recognize the point where the tournament switches from early to early/middle, and how that relates to your stack. Harrington's "M" count helps out here, but I prefer Barry Greenstein's big blind count, which he discusses in his book (go all-in if you have >10 BB's with any hand you'd typically otherwise play).
As tournaments go on, survival becomes less important if you're holding a moderate stack. You're not in this to cash, you're in it to win.
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