Short Stack Live

Yesterday i finally got in the mood to play poker again. Just havn't really felt like it. guess because i am running good. <--lol. Anyways i got off of work, and thought about what to play.

This is important for me to give my self a bit of time to decide what i want to play. because if i am feeling laggie, and go decide to 4 table hi-low, i am getting smoked. Taking 10 mins or so to decide what my best choice in games is very critical.

Decided I wanted to play some NL sng's. cool beans. But with is the wierd part. ususally i play 6 max sng's, or heads up. But i decided i wanted to try and 4 table 9 man regular sng's. The most i have ever played was 2 sng's at once, and have always had trouble with it. But the last time i tryed it was ages ago, and on my laptop with tons of overlap. sooo....i decided to do 4 tables, and do them in a set. Play 4 untill they are all done. That way i don't skrew up while getting use to the sng's again.

Things went great. I got off to a decent start in one, and pretty well folded untill the blinds hit 50-100. From their i made a few hands and had 2 of the sng's up to 2500+ in chips, and the others were around 1000-1500. Ended up busting out of one, getting a 3rd in another.

Getting the 3rd in the second sng was really a boost. This ment even if i bombed out of the other 2 i was only going to lose 13 bucks. MUUUCH better than droping 22 dollars on what is pretty much a test run. So by now i am 4 and 5 handed, and bust out in 5th in the 3rd sng.

meh, really wanted to get in the money on both of them, but alas we don't always get what we want. So on the final sng, i played pretty good. Was the big stack at the bubble with the shortie in the bb while i was sb. This ment i could 3x the bet on the button/cut off and usually get folds. Then if i didn't have a good hand i would just fold my sb to the short stack.

There was a interesting post about this on pocket fives. Giving up chips to the short stack, so you could take more chips from the other players. While i don't agree with doing this in a MTT, but in a sng i have had a decent amount of luck with this stratagy.

So the bubble burst, and i pretty much had a cake walk to first place. whee.

22.00 in buyins
9.00 for 3rd
22.50 for 1st.
So ended up =9.50 for a ROI of 40 something %

Ok from there i went to the Live 20 dollar re-buy here in mason. 20 bucks gets you 5k in chips, and you start at 50-100 with 30 min blind levels. The structure is really good. nice and slow. So i was staked into it, 17 players. I made a actual ARI move that worked. 6 handed before the we moved to the final table i raised it 3x bb to 1800 at 3-600 blinds with 44 from utg. had around 10k in chips. table had been somewhat tight, but still a bunch of donks. So a player moved all in for around 5k. this guy could be doing this with a somewhat wide range. Then this lady that had only played poker 4 times before called the all in for less than 5k. so it gets to me and there is 300+600+1800+5k+~3k in the pot. I thought for a bit and decided there was too much in the pot for me to fold, and i also thought there was about a 60% chance i was up against overs. the guy had AQ and the girl had AK. I was really happy, untill they hit, but oh well. I was still really happy i called off a lot of chips with way the best of it.

Called a 3xbb raise with 10-6 suited, having about 14 bb's, and thinking the guy was 1) on tilt 2) re-buy period was almost over, and i am looking to maybe take a few chances to get some chips. flop comes 7-8-2 with 2 of my suits. pot has 6.5 bb's in it, i have 12.5 left. I push. He calls with 7-9. Thats about the best i could hope for. I have 3 outs with the 10, 2 with the gutshot, and 9 flush outs. and some random runner runner odd ball crap. spike the 5 of of my suit on the turn, and 4 of my suit for a strait flush. oh yes, i run good. untill i drop 8 bb's on my next hand. blah.

All tournament i had around 10X bb. never had a stack for very long, and just played shortstacked all day. ended up getting down to 4 players and with me as the short stack with ~10X bb. 3 players get payed, but i thought i would try and get some money out of the deal. These guys often make deals that are horrible. 2-1 chip leads will even chop heads up. So i suggested we take 20 dollars a piece out of the pot. everone agreed. wheee. that was horrible on their part, but oh well. We played 2-3 hours with 4 players and most of the time with me and another guy around 8-10Xbb. It didn't bother me, because they were folding to my pushes, and i was treading water easily waiting for a big hand.

Then the blinds go to 2000-4000 and the short stack had ~15K, i had ~20K, 2nd in chips had ~25K, and the chip leader at maybe 35-40K. the other players were getting tired and bored, so i though i would at lease take a shot at making a deal.

After a hand was over i sayed that this was basically a crap shoot, and even the chip leader is gone if he loses 2 hands in a row. With 460 in the pot after we took the 20 dollars out, we could all walk out of here with 135 dollars total, avoid all the luck involved with blinds so high, and we could go home.

well they kindof were quiet, but then it was a "well whatever everyone else wants to do" fest, and i got them to agree to an even chop. WHEEEEEEEEEEEE

That was just a great deal for me. If we had played it out...
0$ for 4th
40 for 3rd
126 for 2nd
294 for 1st.

getting a little less than second place money, while on in 3rd chip position with a 5Xbb stack. I will take that all day long. even tho i think i have a decent edge over them in a situation like this due to all of my sng play, i think this is a great deal.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE again,
-Take