I was actually just going to post this in response to a thread in general strategy, but I figured I would join these parts of the forums since I've always been a cash player.






I've transferred most of my money from Stars to FTP for rakeback, but I do love the occasional tournament.

I've grinded from the $4 leftover dollars to $10 playing .02/.04 shlhe while waiting for the transfer (3 days of 3 tabling).

Now, I'm playing all my cash games over at FTP and I want to use Stars for doing tournaments.

With $10, what are the lowest risk tournaments to play in and what advice/strategy would you utilize in deciding what tournaments to play in?

Choices I think (let me know if I missed any):

6 player nlhe 1.10

9 player nlhe 1.20

18 player nlhe 1.20

45 player nlhe 1.20

18 player nlhe 1.75 turbo

45 players nlhe 1.10 turbo

I'm a good HU player so would maybe the 2.20 HU nlhe ?




What would you do with $10 if you weren't going to redeposit on stars and wanted to play tournaments only?

I'd play 2 4.40s but I don't really do the whole BR management thing when I have that little of money
Thats what I did for the past week and I cashed 3 times and didn't FT, so I stayed even pretty much. Then I took 2nd for 144 in one of em', and cashed out cuz Im broke in real life

Yeah, I definitely want to get into playing the 4.40s consistently They look like a lot of fun and I would probably hop into playing them consistently if I had 30 or 40 bucks.

That brings up another question, though.

With solid tournament strategy, the ability of the players, etc, how bad is the risk of taking those two shots in the 4.40's vs. say... 9 $1.10 6 person shots?

Well, the most likely scenario if you play 2 4.40s is that you'll be broke.

If you play 9 $1 STTs, you'll probably be up.

It depends whether you can be bothered trying to grind them up, if you can just redeposit i'd play $3.40 SNGs cause 4.40s have a lower ITM rate.

If you want to make something with the $10 though playing tournaments, then obv play the lowest you can find and stay away from MTTs and 2.20s.

The $1.10 45-man turbos have become my fav, but with $10 you do run the risk of busting out before you can put together some cashes. Although my ROI in these is about 65%, I have run as badly as 13 in a row without cashing.

Although the rake is high at 20%, the easiest way to start building a roll is the $1.20 STTs because the competition is so soft. It's slow-going, though, because of the high rake and low payouts. It really depends on whether you're in a rush or whether you're prepared to be patient.

If you know how to play shorthanded reasonably well, I'd say hop into the 6handed sngs. Although shorthanded games involve a lot of variance, the play in the shorthanded sngs is generally horrendous and it should not be difficult to run nothing into something.

Oh, I have extreme patience because my main roll is on another site and this is just extra money to play around with. I wanted to break into the tournament scene for practice and fun ... not really super serious grinding. Just wanted to avoid redepositing and play off of what I have only.

I've had mixed luck with $3.40 6-man turbos. I've won a couple $1.10 45-man turbos, or placed top 3 in them.

I even do decent in the $.10 tourneys that pop up. You just have to avoid the shove-fests for the first hour or two and then when you're ITM you can play decent poker. You have to run really deep in them to get any real money though.

Patients has been paying off quite well for me in the $1.20 18-man NLHE games.

Patience pays off huge in $1 tournies. You can go fairly deep, whether in a STT, 18-man, or 45-man, just by allowing other players to make their mistakes. And they will make plenty of mistakes.