Monday, April 17, 2006

The Mighty Pocket Eights Cracked

Party Poker $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
300 hands
+$32

Party Poker $3 NL Tourney
156th/1,339
(-$3)

Another good night of 6-max which got cut short in order to get some work done.

Rather than pay full attention to my work I played a $3 No Limit tourney in the background while I worked. This was only the 2nd tourney I have played at Party I believe and I can't get over how crazy-aggressive people are in the early going. 1,339 people registered and by the end of the first hour barely over 500 remained. Under 200 were left at the time of the 2nd break. I saw some crazy all-in's. People were pushing (or calling, I wasn't paying enough attention) with 3rd pair no kicker, King high and worse.

I got pocket Kings in the blinds fairly early and joined the mob mentality and pushed all-in with them. Someone in early position had raised to 200 and got many many callers. I would have been happy to just snap it off and take the pot preflop, but of course I got 3 callers instead. The Kings held up and I quadrupled up early and was the chip leader for a few minutes. Not much happened for a while after this. I reraised with AKo at one point and the initial raiser went way over top of me. I ended up laying it down and he showed KK. Other than that, I lost a couple large pots by missing a flop here and there in addition to making a couple really awful bluffs into players holding very strong hands. Oops. Some reads may have helped but my no limit tourney experience (read: next to none) has me as a big underdog in these things anyway.

With a shortstack I made some pushes here and there to stay alive. Usually just taking the blinds. It all caught up to me when a big stack on the button raised my big blind first-in when I was holding pocket Eights. I pushed, he called, his Ace found a mate and I got knocked out a few minutes before the money.

With a stack of 8K and the big blind at 1.2K I might have been able to sneak into the money which started at 140th had I just done nothing but fold for a few orbits. For the $4.01 I missed out on had I snuck into the money with a tiny stack, I am happy to have taken the chance to double up instead. I needed to double up a couple times to have any chance at going deep.

I may try a couple more of these over the next couple weeks as I can actually get work done while playing a tourney. I would not be able to do that at all with a 6-max ring game.

The tourney turned out to be a pretty good showing for me. Having low results to compare to rules. I should definitely quadruple up early on more often. Sounds like a simple plan and I can't believe I haven't thought of it before. Ha. ha. Sleep time.

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