Friday, June 09, 2006

Fun with Limit SNG's

Friday Night Summary

Party Poker $1/$2 6-max Limit
1 hour played, 1 table
+$30

Early in the evening Thursday night while I was depositing at Party, updating their software and registering at Ladbrokes my girlfriend was playing a couple $5+$1 Limit hold 'em SNG's, one on Party and one on Paradise. I have no idea why she likes to play one from each site at the same time as they have different starting chips, blind levels, etc, but I haven't bothered questioning the practice. At some point, her stomach must have reached the breaking point as she jumped up to go to the kitchen to make some supper and asked me to finish her two SNG's. I was about to get started on clearing the Party bonus but playing out a couple SNG's while she made supper seemed like a pretty damned good deal to me, so I obliged.

I hadn't played a limit hold 'em SNG before and wasn't sure exactly what the optimal strategy was, so I just played fairly tight in the early going. When she handed off the two SNG's they were both in the 3rd level or so and both of her stacks were average. For the most part I didn't mix it up with anyone but did get involved in a few hands. It really doesn't take many raises to get a rather large portion of your stack in the middle, fortunately the hands held up. Slowly people started disappearing and once both SNG's were down to 6 people I felt right at home. And once these things are down to 6, people seem to drop like flies. Stacks get whittled down and people just have to commit themselves to a hand and away they go.

Anyway, before I knew it both SNG's were down to the final three and I had a bigstack at paradise and the 2nd stack at Party. I'm not sure exactly what happened at Paradise but both people went out on the same hand against me. At Party we stayed 3 handed for a while with the bigstack raising just about every hand preflop and leading the betting. Several hands went with the line of bigstack raising preflop, me 3-betting, bigstack leading flop, me raising, bigstack calling and then leading turn, me raising, bigstack calls and leads river, I call, I collect many chips. After the third or so hand like this I was sitting on a mountain of chips and shortly thereafter it was all over.

Winning back-to-back SNG's is pretty rare for me. In the 130something NL SNG's I have played at Stars I think I have only won two in a row twice. I did get some good cards when I needed them but I wonder if I shouldn't be trying some limit SNG's out myself. I have played a couple limit MTT's but pretty much got destroyed everytime. With all my 6-max play though, I felt quite comfortable once we got shorthanded.

My girlfriend got a few extra bucks in her poker accounts and I got a delicious meal. Win win. A little later she fired up an Omaha Hi Lo SNG accidentally. This made for some great entertainment. "I just won a split pot and I have no idea why!". This was all the more hilarious because I am pretty certain I said the exact same thing more than once the first time I played Omaha. Yeah, we suck.

We were out Friday night after work for a few drinks, which of course turned into seven hours of drinking. Actually, this was an earlier than normal night as we usually end up tacking a few more hours onto that. I probably wasn't in the best state to be playing any poker when I got home, so I kept to just one table. I ended up not playing like a complete idiot and did okay, posting a $30 win over the course of an hour before calling it a night.

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