I’m not sure if MTT (multi-table tournament) success has done something to alter my results in Sit-and-Go’s, but I’ve been stinking up the place of late any time I sit down to play one. Granted, it’s not entirely because of bad play but I’m the first to admit my attention level goes way down in a SNG, and I usually only pop one up whenever I’m bored grinding away in a standard tournament at the same time. But one format in particular I’m having no luck in are the heads up variety. For those of you who don’t know, any time I’ve played a new level of buy-in (such as Freeroll, $1, $5, $10 etc) I’ve always won my first tournament…every time. So I sat down to play a mini heads-up tournament where four players play two matches heads up to determine the winner of a token used to buy-in to a larger tournament. I took out the first opponent in three hands, and the second in under 20. The streak continues! But then came a loss, a quick one at that. AK vs. 85 losing half my stack, followed up quickly by QQ heads-up pushed in position running into pocket Kings. Out. Then an unlikely string of results such as three straight SNGs where I lost in straight-over-straight situations and even two IN A ROW where I was taken down in SET-OVER-SET confrontations….heads up!
This great abundance of luck has also been finding its way into my regular tournaments as well. Last night I was working my way through a 600+ person deep-stack tournament maintaining a top-20 position for most of the tournament after an initially phenomenal run of cards, flopping sets on rainbow Ace-high boards (yummy), nut straights etc. which helps the table give up even more pots uncontested out of fear that you’ve flopped even more monsters. Chip up and go deep. After being moved to a more similarly stacked table, I pick up JJ (oh how I love thee) in the Big Blind after it’s folded around to me…except for the LAG (loose-agressive) player that limped in the first position. After only a few hands you could see they were playing a wide range of subpar hands, such as Ace-rags, pocket TTs as if they were AA and so on. So time for a standard 4x raise to test their hand strength. Then there is a massive reraise all-in, vastly inappropriate based on the tournament stage and the amount of damage I could do to their stack (they’d be severely crippled if I call and win). After a short thought, and mostly because they were practically begging me to fold with the odd overbet, I called expecting to see something like A9 or even TT. Lo and behold he/she also held JJ. We’ll share a laugh and … uh oh, three spades on the flop. They have the Jack of spades. Surely not … there’s the fourth spade. Bounced. Time clocked approximately 2hrs. Woot.
Internet shuffles are completely random :)
SNG strategy adjustments in progress…
