3 replies to this topic

[BrandonPL]

The tournament I have been playing in lately has the following structure:

Starting chips 10,000
Starting blinds 100-200
Rounds 30 minutes with every level played

It took a little while to get adjusted to having a big 'feeling' stack but in reality its not big at all with blinds starting at 100-200 and only 30 minute rounds.

Now the problem I am having is that I love to play small ball poker. My raises are always 2.5xbb before antes and 3xbb after antes. I like to play pots heads up or in position against 2-3 opponents. With this tournament though, people seem to think they have a huge starting stack (you know 10,000 chips just sounds like a lot). We play a similar tourney with 4000 chips and 25-50 blinds where everyone plays like absolute rocks and my small raises pick up the blinds 1/3 of the time, take the pot heads up 1/3 of the time, and get multi way action 1/3 of the time.

In the new tourney with 10,000 chips my small raises take the blinds roughly 5% of the time, go heads up probably 20% of the time, and go multi way 75% of the time. This is against the exact same players who play the smaller tourney.

Now in the small tourney I would say the average raise is 3xbb, however, with the 10,000 chips the average raise is 5-6xbb. This completely hurts the style of poker I want to play and I can't really figure out what adjustments to make other than play tighter. I find it amazing that the first hand of this tourney someone will raise to 1000 (1/10 of their chips) and get 5 way action. Does anyone have any real experience playing a tourney with a similar structure or in one where small ball poker just doesn't work at all.

[zmoney]

This is pretty common in lower to mid level enty tournaments. Players without a lot of expirience dont have a real good perception of the value of chips in relation to the blinds. I think playing tight and punishing their weak calls with raises from postion with less than premium holding is the way to go. Also squeezing out of the blinds is a good play against week players who flat call out of line raises.

[antistuff]

Does anyone have any real experience playing a tourney with a similar structure or in one where small ball poker just doesn't work at all.

be patient, wait for good cards, and bet them. small ball you are kind of playing to steal lots of little pots. the opposite of that is to play just a couple of big pots for value.

[ObeyTheDog]

The smaller tourney you mentioned is vastly superior for your style.

You have 80 BB's. In the 10k tourney, you have only 50 BB's.

So from a strategical perspective, you should be playing the 10k tourney tighter even if players played exactly the same (or even more aggressive...) The bottom line is that each chip is worth more to your stack, and each bet on a similar scale of 3x BB is costing you more of your overall stack in the 10k tourney.

That's if all bets are equal.

When you add in the fact that players are raising on a larger scale, say from 4x-5x, now you are risking even more chips of your stack, so playing the "same" style is not going to work.

So you answered your own question, really. The reason you can't play small ball in the 10k tourney is because it costs you too much to enter a pot. Sounds like the game is very loose and inexperienced, so I'd say, play a more A-B-C style of poker until you can accumulate a nice stack where you have 80-100 BB's, or at least a large stack in comparison to your table, so you can then make looser calls and try to use your stack as a weapon instead of a defense mechanism.