Ring Turbo SNG Strategy -- Part 1

OK so here it is. After numerous requests in the comments and over girly and email, today I will post the first part of my long-ago written strategy post on turbo sng's. I never actually finished this series of posts, though I had made an outline, so I guess it remains to be seen how far I take this series and exactly when. But tonight I am feeling like firing up a good old strategy post, and this is one that I wrote a while ago and frankly one that I have promised here on the blog for several months. Such is the life of the everyday blogger though, at least this everyday blogger. I basically never know what I'm going to write about when I get up in the morning. I probably have a hundred half-written (or completely written) posts saved in draft form on my server at blogspot. I think of something one day at 9pm, and I write it down and save it in draft. Maybe I get back to it a few days later, or a few weeks later, and maybe not for a year or more. That's what happened for example with my "Credit Card Mania" post from last week. I probably wrote that badboy 18 months ago, the first time anyways. I've gone back to it a few times since then, refined, added some more details that seemed to make the story better. And then one day out of the blue it suddenly seemed like the time. Who knows why. All I know is, today is the time for the beginning of the long-awaited and long-promised turbo sng strategy post. Enjoy.

Part I of this post will deal with starting card strategy. Before I start it is important to cover what I affectionately call "the disclaimer". Why I do this, I don't know, but it just feels like the right thing to point out at the beginning whenever I do a strategy post like this. So please understand, this post and any others that I do in this series are for me. They are by me, for me. It is me writing down my strategy that I like to take when I play turbo sngs. This strategy has worked well for me as a rule. I go through losing streaks in sngs just like anyone does. I get bored of them, make impatient plays and lose just as much as the next guy. But over time this strategy has worked for me. For me. This does not mean that it will or may work for you. I'm not trying to say it should or will work for you. In fact I'm saying it may not, or more accurately that I don't really care because, again, I am writing this post for me. Whenever I do a nice strategy post, I get better at the game of poker and better at the specific topic of the post I am writing. Every time. It's great, and I enjoy doing it. Just the act of analyzing the situations, thinking through hand ranges and possible results, and especially putting it all into some kind of structured presentation in a way that flows easily from simpler, more common concepts to the rarer and more complex ones, it all gives me a much better and clearer understanding of the topic of the post and makes me a better player overall.

So that's why I write a post like this. Now as my readers know, I am all about hand analysis and objective analysis of given hands. And I would be more than happy to do that here with these turbo sng posts. But please don't write me all pissy saying that you are following my system and losing money, and what an idiot I am. I'm not the idiot in that scenario. You're the idiot. I'm not posting a strategy for you to copy and try to use without regard to your own personal strengths and weaknesses as a player. I'm just posting my strategy, for myself to read, and doing so in a public forum where you are finding it and for some reason are insisting on trying to duplicate it yourself. Your bad, not mine. For me, writing this down helps my game immensely, I secretly enjoy doing it when I can find the time, and if it helps some of you too then that is a great outcome. But I'm not suggesting that this is how you should do or play anything. I am merely stating how I usually play the game. That is all.

OK with that out of the way, a few other opening points. Most important is to keep in mind that the strategy I will be describing in this post or posts is my own strategy and my own strategy alone. While I do believe that most sng pros play the game very similarly to how I play it, I do not know that to be the case and I'm not trying to say otherwise here. Again, this is just how I play the game, not how you do nor how anyone does or should.

Second, notice from the title of this post, this is my strategy for turbo sngs only. Make no mistake, the strategy in a non-turbo format is similar, but certainly different at the margins than the one I espouse in this post. In a turbo format, the entire 1-table sng is going to be over with in 40, 45 minutes in most cases, 50 minutes tops, so you simply cannot sit around and wait for premium cards. You're probably only going to see 100 hands or fewer in this thing even if you run all the way to the end and win, so it's not like you can just wait for the AA or KK which together only come once every couple hours or so. So this is a turbo sng strategy, not a regular sng strategy which would have to be tighter with fewer starting hands played.

Lastly, notice also from the title, this is for ring game turbo sng strategy. When you cut it down to a 6-max sng -- something which I love to play btw -- again the strategy tends to change, this time becoming even more aggressive and opening things up even further as far as perflop starting cards and similar issues. But again, this post is the strategy that I tend to use in ring game (typically 9-player) turbo format nlh sitngos.

OK, now finally on to the actual post. The first thing that I always keep in mind about starting hand selection is to always be very careful what I play from early position, because the turbo format leads to a very pusy-y game. In other words, with the turbo action working, and thus the blinds moving up literally every three minutes, it is often that a preflop reraise is an allin move, or at least an amount that basically commits the reraiser to get it allin on that play. After more than 15 or 20 minutes in, this will be the case for all but the top stacks remaining in the tournament. So, when I am in early position in the turbo sngs, I tend to be very, very careful -- even moreso than in a standard mtt or a cash table where I might have the chips and/or the structure to play a few speculative hands from up front.

All that said, in the turbo ring sng's, I tend to open with AJo or better from early position, including utg. Sometimes I will even do this with ATo, but really I have my doubts about the long-term profitability of playing even AT from this position. Even AJo utg is not a strong hand generally speaking, especially to play from out of position all through the hand, but I find that the turbo nature of the sitngo dictates that I can't just throw away AJ every time I see it or else I might end up allin in a worse spot not too much later on. So from early position, I will open-raise with AJo or better. From middle position in an unopened pot, I will ratchet that down a little bit, maybe to the A8/A9 range plus KQ. And from the cutoff, button or small blind, I will generally open-raise with any Ace and most strong Kings, and some of the higher soooted connectors as well.

Just a quick bit about bet sizing. The turbo sngs will start you off with 1500 chips, blinds of 10-20, and 3-minute blind rounds. In other words, it is not a deep tournament, and within 15 minutes or so as I mentioned above, you're basically committed if you call a single raise either before or after the flop, or very close to committed. As a result of all this, I personally do not believe in over-raising before the flop to really narrow the field to one or at most two players. I know some of the cardrunners guys advocate this and I saw some bloggers having the discussion a couple of months back, but for me, I just to 3x raises all the time in the turbo ring sitngos. I find this to be the easiest method to implement, requiring next to no thought, and since there are never antes in the turbo sngs on full tilt, I never feel the need to adjust up my standard raises above the 3x threshhold. 3x basically gets me to the 1.6 or 1.7 to 1 pot odds I want to offer to the other players at the table, so I tend to just make 3x raises all the time before the flop, and again this strategy has worked well for me.

Now a word about being reraised. Again, given the general opening strategy I described above -- open-raising AJ+ from early position, A8+ from middle and any Ace from late position, this dictates a certain amount of discretion early in the sitngo if I do get caught raising on the light side. Thus, I will lay down the lower part of all of those ranges to reraises early. So, if I open-raise the 30-chip blind to 90 eight minutes in to the turbo sng when I am holding A8o, and then the cutoff reraises me 3 or 4x my raise, I am usually going to fold. If I know I can't or won't have this kind of discipline, that is ok but then I need to tighten up my playable hand ranges even more than what I descibed above. If I'm going to raise A8 or A7 as a rule with several players still to act behind me, personally I will only ever follow that strategy if I know I can follow the second part of it, which is folding to reraises early, when my original raise has not yet committed me and when my opponents' hand ranges likely trump mine. Similarly, if I open-raise KQo from third position and then the button repops up another 3x my preflop raise, I am likely going to lay it down. I am probably up against an Ace, AQ or a pair a heck of a lot more often than I'm not, and why take a flop where I am taking the worst of it going on and where I will have no idea where I'm at almost no matter what actually falls on the flop.

As far as what I will call a reraise with early in a turbo ring sng, that is only the hands at the very top of the range I described above. AK is almost always good for a reraise or for calling a reraise, again only because we are talking about turbo here, and even AQ is often (but not always) worthy of calling a standard-sized (not allin) reraise with early in the sng. Otherwise, it is AK, maybe AQ, and the big pairs, down to maybe JJ or so. In a turbo format I think folding JJ to a preflop reraiser is a tough decision to make -- again in a regular-speed event I can lay this down much easier -- but when I'm facing an allin for 50 big blinds (1500 chips) very early in a turbo sng, a pocket pair like TT or certainly 99 or lower is not looking too strong at all. At that point I will typically want to fold, unless I can discern some read from my opponent that he may be holding a lower pocket pair. But that early in the tournament, with that little invested in the pot so far, I think it becomes very hard to justify taking an 80% chance of a race plus a 20% chance of being dominated by a higher pair. Later on in the sng you don't always have much choice as far as whether you can / should commit in this spot, but early in the sitngo I try to only call preflop reraises with the top four or five pocket pairs but the top one or two unpaired cards. Otherwise I would rather pass and wait for either better cards or a better spot to get my money in than that.

Lastly for today, as far as when to go allin with my own raises, I tend to follow the rule of 10x. I saw this somewhere in a book or online somewhere, and as a general rule I have found it to be a very useful guideline for when a standard-sized raise is likely to commit a player for his or her entire stack, and thus should just move allin instead of making the more usual, 3x type of raise. So, for example, if blinds have just moved up to 50-100, and I have AJo in middle position in an unopened pot with a stack of 980 chips, I'm not bumping that badboy up to 300. It's all in for the first move there. What do I want to push in 300 for, leaving me with a paltry 680 chips remaining in my stack in a pot where, even if I am called by just one other player, will likely have 750 chips in it by the time the flop is dealt. Obviously I am pushing with ATC on that flop, and obviously I am calling with my AJ before the flop if any opponent reraises me allin, rather than me folding there and leaving myself with just 680 chips and a big blind of 100. So since with fewer than 10 big blinds I know I will be pot-committed on the flop basically no matter what, or even before the flop if my opponent reraises me, I tend to just move allin myself whenever I want to raise and have fewer than 10 big blinds to play with.

Also, if I have fewer than 5x the big blind, then not only do I play the sitngo hand as an allin-or-fold situation, but I am significantly widening the range of cards that I will push allin with given my short stack. Basically, if the blinds are up to 75-150 and I am holding 650 chips, then my stack is so short that, for me, I want to move allin preflop into any unopened pot from any position with any kind of playable hand. Certainly I am allin with any Ace (completely regardless of my kicker) with such a short stack, and frankly, with fewer than 5 big blinds, I might be tempted to push allin with ATC from anything in middle or late position overall.

OK this seems like a good place to stop for the beginning to my ring turbo sitngo strategy post. There is a ton more content on this topic that I've already pulled together and written in many instances, but this should serve as a good general introduction to the turbo sng game that I like to play, when it comes to early-tournament, preflop decisions. Of course all of this changes once the sng wears on a little bit and the Ms begin their dramatic drop -- much more quickly in turbo than you might think -- but for a general guideline this is how I tend to play the turbo ring sitngos during the first few blind rounds when the stacks are still relatively deep compared to the blinds. My general approach, even in the turbos, is that there is no excuse for busting in those first few rounds out without a strong hand, period. As I said, that mantra changes quite dramatically fairly quickly in turbo sng land, but for starting off with the first few rounds, I try to raise with a fairly defined range, and I do not call off my chips in situations where my hand range is clearly behind that of my opponent.

I will try to get up Part 2 -- or really, Part 1(a) -- with a number of screenshots and other examples and discussion of my early sitngo approach before the flop, as soon as I can. If I'm a man, I will do it for my Thursday post. But, I guess that might be a little difficult to do here, what with me winning the Mookie tonight and all.

Don't forget the Mook, 10pm ET tonight on full tilt. Password as always is "vegas1". I am already registered and will be there for my weekly waste of time donation.

Final BBTwo MATH, and Back On My Game

This weekend, it would seem that I finally came out of the semi-slump I had been experiencing for the past little while. Couple of months even I guess. I mean, I've had some nice wins smattered throughout that time, but in my personal opinion I have not been playing my best game for some time, and I think I've seen that in my results. But I digress....



That's right boys and girls. Tonight is the last night of the BBTwo-enabled MATH. Oh don't worry -- the weekly Monday night MATH tournament as we know it will continue on into perpetuity, or until I die an untimely death or when they finally outlaw and prevent anyone in the U.S. from playing poker online. But this is the last week of the BBTwo, with four juicy tournaments for each and every one of you to pick up one of the last four BBTwo Aussie Millions Tournament of Champions freeroll seats. We've got the MATH on Monday night, the Mookie on Wednesday, Riverchasers on Thursday, and then we will end the BBTwo just the way it started, with the Big Game on this coming Sunday night for your TOC-qualifying pleasure, and it all begins with tonight's MATH tournament at 10pm ET on full tilt. The password as always for the MATH is "hammer", and tonight the game is once again 6-max no-limit holdem. No turbo, nothing fancy, just plain old 6-max nlh. I think I alluded to this in an earlier post, but my plan for the time being is to make the MATH a 6-max nlh event for the foreseeable future starting in 2008. I mean, it will be 6-max tonight and again I believe next Monday, but I have something fun planned for the last two Mondays of the year, as they happen to occur on Christmas Eve and then New Years Eve, so only the abject junkies(including myself) will be playing in those two events. Otherwise though, for the time being I think we're looking at 6max nlh, starting with tonight for the MATH at 10pm ET on full tilt. Same $26 buyin, same "hammer" password, but come out tonight for your last chance to qualify for the BBTwo ToC for the Aussie Millions in the Hoy.

OK so back to the weekend. As I mentioned earlier, while you guys were all out living it up in Las Vegas over the weekend, I went and turned my game around in a hurry from right here in my bedroom.

The fun started when jeciimd, your current 2nd place on the BBTwo leaderboard btw after a 3rd-place finish in the first BBT, hit me up on the girly and talked me into starting up one of these 90-person $24 knockout sngs on full tilt. I think I've never played a 90-person sng in my life on full tilt, though I used to enjoy those 180-person tournaments on assholestars so I figured why not, I would give it a shot. Fast forward about 2 1/2 or 3 hours, and 7 $4 bounties later to mean I was already freerolling the thing, and I had ended up in 2nd place overall out of 90 runners. Total profit of over $350 net, I will definitely take me some of that. That will buy me into my next 35 Mookie's right there without ever winning one, you can't beat that, right? I was disappointed not to win it, but I entered heads-up play as about a 3 to 1 chip underdog, and as it is I got allin on the flop with a pair and an OESD. Unfortunately my opponent held a higher pair, and the OESD did not fill, and I just didn't have the chips to withstand that kind of a beat. I would push again at a 3-to-1 chip deficit with pair + OESD, so I'm happy about how that whole thing turned out overall. My final table play was impeccable to get to that point, and for that I have got to credit playing a lot of one-table sngs recently. More on that in a minute.

Anyways, the real reason I was on on Friday night and willing to start that 90-person sng is that I knew the Kat-less donkament was going on and I figured I would jump in there as well. I was laughing about it with some friends on the girly chat this weekend, but I basically get my ass mauled in that thing every single week during Monkey Hour. I mean, one time I got lucky a few times and I went on to win the donkament that week after I ended the first hour with the chip lead and just never relinquished it, but the way I see it, everyone takes out their anger and aggression on me for playing so aggressively in all the other blonkaments every week and for ranting and raving like a lunatic here on the blog about the play of others, and as a result I end up having to buy in at least 10 or 12 times without exception, sometimes as many as 20 times or more, and in the end I basically always end the first hour right around the minimum possible stack. I do enjoy playing the donkament, but even though I joke that it is my poker therapy for the week, in reality I see it more as poker therapy for my opponents against me rather than actually for me. In any event, the story was the same this week, as I ended Monkey Hour at just under 4000 chips and about 2/3 of the way down the leaderboard. Nonetheless, after three hours of grueling play, here was the end result:



Booooooooom! My second donkament win of the year, and a huge $30 profit for exactly three hours of play and hard work. Wow.

But the real story of my big run this weekend was at the sng tables. Although a lot of people have noticed or even participated in the recent string of sng challenges and similar assaults on the sng tables among the poker bloggers, few people know that I actually started this assault a few weeks back. I began hitting up the $55 and $110 turbo sng's about a month ago, something which a number of other bloggers quickly started doing as well, although I'm happy to say I don't run into many other bloggers at the 55s and 110s where I focus most of my play. Really I'm more often in the $55 turbos than anything else, and I have to say that overall the results have been really great in a few key ways. First and foremost, the bottom line. I don't keep detailed stats and I don't have any foncay graphs to show of my performance, but I would estimate that I am up around 2k on the $55 and $110 turbos in the past month. Just this weekend alone, I cashed in 12 out of 17 $55 turbo sngs, including 7 outright wins for $247 and change apiece, or a net profit of over $180 in each. And that doesn't even count the two $110 turbo sngs I also won outright for each a $495 payout. It was a very profitable weekend for me overall at the tables for a number of reasons, the sngs being a big part of it. That 90-person sng from Friday and the donkament helped too, as did three other large mtt cashes on the weekend including in the 50-50 on Sunday night which I qualified for for $28 earlier in the night, but overall my results really shot up this weekend so at least I had that to hang my hat on while knowing all the fun that was going on in my absence in a certain place in the desert.

But more than the profits, these sng's have really been helping with my confidence in my game in general, my end game in particular, and have also helped me to focus on some realities of tournament play that I haven't spent a lot of time focusing on of late. There is nothing -- no way whatsoever -- that is going to help your shorthanded or late-game tournament play more than sitting in a bunch of 1-table sngs. I mean, where else can you get the hands-on practice at shorthanded, low-M nlh tournaments that you can get every time you sit down to a sitngo tournament? You just can't. At the $55 level, the money means enough -- at least to me -- to take the play very seriously, and as a result I find that if I make marginal calls of preflop raises with hands like the jackace and pocket 6s, I'm going to run into trouble. Playing as many sngs as I have in the past month -- I would estimate it is something around a hundy of them at this point -- I have gotten to relearn what kinds of hands to push with early and what kinds of hands are worth passing on before the pots get big to begin with.

Another thing that these 1-table turbo sngs are great for is reading players, and in particular reading players for steals and resteals. I cannot tell you how many times over the past month I have reraised a button open-raiser with air and won (and a few times I've lost btw) just based on watching their play, the pace with which they put in their bets and just their betting amounts and patterns generally, and this is all good for my game. As I've written about here many times, I tend to play my game based more on my instincts and my reads than anything else, and I purposefully go out of my way to encourage stealing and restealing, because I invite this sort of approach from my opponents because, frankly, I believe I am better at it on balance than they are. So these sng's have really helped me to hone my reading abilities and my penchant for sniffing out blind stealers, which is all good for me and my game, at all parts of a tournament.

One other aspect of poker math that I am constantly faced and re-faced with as a result of all of these turbo 1-table sngs is heads-up allin preflop odds. Especially with the turbo structure, give it 20-25 minutes or so and it becomes pretty much automatic for a short stack, for example, to open-push allin from the button with almost ATC, and certainly with any Ace. So, for example, I am re-learning just how likely one is to win with a hand like QJo when up against Ace-rag. After all these sng's, I have re-learned all over again about figuring pot odds given the large blinds in the late stages of these short tournament to know whether it makes sense to call with that QTs against a guy I know is pushing any Ace. As anyone who's played a lot of these sngs recently can attest, these two-middle-cards against a top-and-bottom hand showdowns really end up deciding the final finishing order and payouts of the turbo sitngos a whole lot more than most people may think, so making keen decisions based on pot odds -- even when you think you are likely "behind" but not that much -- is a crucial skill and one that I think most people have not developed nearly as much as it can be developed.

All this is to say that this weekend really got me thinking back in the right frame of mind after several weeks of tilty attitude that definitely had me playing less than my best poker game. So while I look forward like I always do at this time of year to reading all about the great times that were had by all out in Vegas for the WPBT this time around, be forewarned that I've gotten my game back on and I'm coming looking for you tonight in the Hoy and through the rest of this week as well. Monday night's field may still be a bit small due to the return from Vegas of 120-something of our closest fake internet friends, but then with this being the last week to qualify for the freeroll I guess I could see the crowds going either way for the MATH tonight as well for the other blogger tournaments to round out the BBTwo this week. And don't forget to get into that 9:45pm ET nightly token frenzy on full tilt to get your $75 token for this Sunday night's Big Game on full tilt. Even though I already won my token last week and registered for the Big Game, I will probably try to play the frenzy every night this week if I'm around as a showing of solidarity with you all. And although I will write some more about this later in the week, don't forget that KOD is hosting a new Sunday night HORSE knockout tournament as well, starting this Sunday night, also on full tilt. You can look me up to find the tournament, which I believe has the password right on the tournament lobby. Get in there as well for what I am really looking forward to as far as you non-holdem-all-the-time donks out there. More on that later.

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy!!

What Exactly Is This Guy Calling With?

So I'm playing one of these turbo $55 sng's. on full tilt. We're probably about 20 or 25 hands in, and the action folds around to me in the small blind. I open raise with ATo, I think an absolutely automatic play in any turbo sng structure. The big blind smooth calls. I then check the flop when I make TPTK, inducing the bluff I knew was coming as you basically have to do in these 1-table turbos when you call a preflop "steal-raise" like that. My opponent obliges and bets 320 into the 480-chip pot, and I follow through with my planned check-raise, opting to just push it allin rather than try to get cute with the bet amounts:



My opponent surpsies me by calling:



Now I repeat the title of this post: What exactly is this guy calling with? Did he really think his King-high was good? Maybe it was the strength of his kicker? What is he hoping to see hit the board after calling me in this spot?








Oh ok. That's what. My bad.

Cheesus Christopher people.

More SnG Hotness, and Another MATH Victory

I wasn't even sure I was going to play any poker on Monday night. I was feeling kinda tired and think I might be battling some weak form of bug or something, but in the end I got it up for some Mondays at the Hoy action at 10pm ET on full tilt. It is my tournament, after all, right? In the end, Monday proved to be one of the most profitable evenings I have had in what has proven to be an awesome streak of positive variance that has lasted a good 5 or 6 weeks at this point, and arguably through most of this year. As I logged on around 9:15 and still had a little while to go before the Hoy kicked off, I ended up playing another of those $110 turbo sngs. This would be my third sng, after I won the first one last Friday, and I busted fresh in 10th place on a dumbo setup hand QQ vs KK very early on in my second over the weekend. These sngs are a good time for someone who plays like me because, if you can believe this, in the turbos at this level the blinds increase every 3 minutes. Basically this thing is set up such that it usually lasts under an hour and never possibly much more, and it really tends to reward aggressive play, in particular the people who are good at reading when their opponents are weak and will have to fold to a large reraise.

Anyways, the results of turbo $110 sng #3:



Saaaawwweeeeeeeeeeeet. At $495 a pop, I could play these things all day. If I can just sustain this pace of outright winning two out of every three sng's I play, this'll be like a cash cow.... Seriously though, a couple of these a week is all I will ever be able to handle. I get bored with sng's, I've already been there done that and I can even see the beginnings of it creeping in with me now after just 3 or 4 sngs over the past few days. It's just so easy to donk and run, so easy to just register for the next one and forget that first one ever happened. It's all just too easy, and when you focus as much as I do on the games I'm playing, I guess sometimes it's like I just crack when I'm trying to grind out small profits one at a time at sitngos. Just the thought of it makes me cringe. I'm an mtt guy, I'm a cash guy if that's the game, I'll play any variation of poker available at the big online sites. Even if they are the most formulaically profitable form of poker as others have claimed, sng's burn my soul. I die a little bit every time I play in one. It's just too patterned or something. I can do it in small doses perfectly well, but the more I play 'em, the worse I play 'em.

Anyways, on to the MATH. We ended up with 29 runners, a strong showing which made for a $696 prize pool including a sexy $313 and change for first prize, and cash payouts to the top 4 finishers instead of our usual top 3. I had not been feeling strong over the past few days, but for some reason the onset of the latest MATH tournament had me feeling invigorated. As I have been lately during my hot streak in almost all of the blonkaments, I was ready to play aggressively from the getgo and just ratchet it up from there.

My first big hand did not come until the 30-60 blinds level, when I saw a cheap turn card and hit the top of an inside straight against IslandBum. IB called when I raised his turn bet of 180 up to 840 chips, and then on the river when he checked the action to me, I felt I had to do this since he had played this as if he was holding a real hand:



As you can see, Island called when I reverse hoyed him at the river, and I dragged the big pot with my nuts (that does not sound good when I read it to myself). In the end it was just top pair poor kicker that Island called me down with, but that is the kind of action I tend to get in these blonkaments due to my nature as an aggressive player who seemingly would bluff in that spot with the exact same bets and betting pattern as I did here with the nuts on the turn. In particular I tend to get this action following a post like I did about last week's Mookie when I lost heads-up to Surf amidst a flurry of bluffing and stealing with almost no quality cardage throughout that tournament.

A short while later I raised it up preflop with AQo, called only by Don Morris in the blinds, and found a Queen-high flop with two spades. I found the courage to check it, willing to give the hand up if another spade and significant betting ensued, but otherwise planning to checkraise on the turn, which is exactly what I did. Don folded, and I added another 2100 chips to my stack, which moved into 3rd place among all 22 remaining players at the time (29 started).

Around the middle of the second hour of the MATH, I was faced with a very interesting situation when this action came to me before the flop:



What would you do? It's a toughie. Chad hoying there can mean a lot of different things. Knowing Chad like I do, he gets bored and frustrated in these blonkaments very quickly these days. I figured that could be the Hammer, the JackAce, of course AA, KK or AK but probably also any pocket pair, maybe KQs or JTs or T9s (assuming he would get called in most of these spots and wanting to double or get out). So that bet didn't scare me with my Queens, which I figured had to be ahead of his range. But Surf's call of the big allin from Chad is what scared me. In the end, I figured Surf, who is a very good and intuitive player with a lot of poker playing experience, would also have picked up on Chad's likely weakness, and that therefore there was a significant chance that Surf could be calling here with a hand like AJ or AQ or KQ or 66-JJ that he figures is likely ahead but is actually not all that strong against a ton of action. Thus, I decided that Surf still had enough chips to fold, I figured it was more likely than not that I was ahead, and I definitely wanted to get my Queens heads-up against Chad's probably-weaker-than-expected hand instead of against the likely Ace in Surf's hand. So I moved allin:



Surf thought for a good long while and then folded. Perfect. Chad showed this:



and I dragged another large pot, more significantly eliminating KOD in the process who is probably the most difficult guy to play with at your table of any of the bloggers, especially when he gets some chips. Tournaments or cash btw. And the best part about that hand? Surf lamented in the chat that he would have flopped a set -- presumably pocket Tens? -- but of course he made the right laydown then against my Queens and does not want to be the guy drawing to two outs there. This hand gave me my first lead of the tournament, as I was in 1st of 17 remaining at this time.

With 14 players left, I ended up losing a little less than half my stack to Iakaris when my AK < his QQ, dropping me back down to 7400 chips from over 13k I had been just a few minutes earlier. And then I made my laydown of the tournament. I had 99 in the big blind, the action folded around to the button who put in a standard steal-raise. While I pondered what to do with my 9s, Julius Goat in the small blind did a restealy-lookin thing allin for about 3 times the original button raise. I looked at that action, looked at my pocket 9s, and I could not escape the thought that with two Nines I had to figure I was racing there against at least one of these two guys, and possibly far behind to a higher pair as well. And in that case, why bother taking the chance when I still had chips. In the end the button laid it down so I never got to see what Goat had, but I told him I had 9s and he said we would have been racing. Exactly. So I'm glad I laid down there, except that after I folded, I was left in 9th place of the 10 remaining players with 5675 chips in my pile.

A few hands later I think emptyman busted in 10th, and we had made the final table, with me in 6th of 9:



Within the span of four hands early at the final table, Surf was dealt AQ over wwonka69's KQ allin preflop, and then again he found AA > Mike Maloney's 88 allin preflop, to rocket Surf, a very dangerous player, up to 23k and a slight chip lead over katiemother who held 22k at the time with 7 players remaining. I meanwhile did not see any good starting hands early at the final table, so I was forced to resort to my old favorite move -- stealing. I stole a lot of pots, mostly preflop but a few on the flop as well, and that helped me to keep afloat while some of the other players busted and we all crept slowly towards the top 4 spots who would receive cash payouts this week. At the second break, I was in 5th place of 7 remaining, with a chip stack nowhere near the leaders:



Surf's hot streak continued in the third hour of the MATH, as his JTo rivered a King to make a straight to beat NumbBono's KTs, and Surf once again jumped over 22k and a nice chip lead with now just 6 players remaining.

About 10 minutes into Hour 3, RaisingCayne reraised me allin when I held the JackAce, and I made the questionable move of calling his allin push, mostly because he was one of the very short stacks at the table and I knew he needed to make a move with something. He showed AT and was eliminated, my first knockout of the final table, and I was up to 3rd place of 5 remaining, with 19k in my stack. And a nice job to Cayne for making three final tables and two cashes in his first four MATH tournaments. That right there is an impressive run to start things off, and I'd love to see if that can continue.

We played for a good long time here at the money bubble with 5 players remaining, a good 15 minutes of fairly solid push-or-fold play. Of course I raised and reraised like crazy, including reraises with QQ and TT that I received when 5-handed, and I took a slight chip lead at 22k during this time near the end of the bubble for my first chip lead since about 16 players remaining.

Eventually, Goat busted in 5th place when his AQ failed to hold up against Surf's 99, even when Goat flopped an Ace to take about a 9-to-1 lead. Runner-runner clubs on the turn and river gave Surf the four-flush to eliminate Goat on the bubble. So we were in the cash and i looked forward to the action loosening up a bit and maybe some actual play after a flop or two. The chip counts were roughly 32k for Surf, 22k for me, 19k for katiemother and 13k for swimmom95.

Then i took over.

Katiemother called me allin with her AK racing against my pocket pair here:



which I miraculously held on to win. In fact, in this hand I raised katiemother first and I raised her last before the flop. She raised in the middle and committed herself, and my 51% hand held up. I was now up 43k to 24k for Surf to 19k for swimmom95.

A similar thing happened about 9 hands later, when swimmom95 called my massive preflop overraise here:



and lost:



Although this one was also a race, calling with the AQ there was not strictly necessary in my view, while in the last hand katiemother's call with AK was much more standard for a 4-handed situation. In any event, there you have the secret -- I won two 50-50 races when I needed to once we were down to 4-handed. Both times I was ahead slightly heading into the flop, and more importantly in my mind, both times I was the one putting in the last preflop raise, putting the pressure on my opponent, taking advantage of fold equity and giving myself the best chance to win without needing to go to that race. I'm glad I was rewarded for this play late in the final table of the MATH this week.

In any event, I headed into heads-up play against Surf with a 70k to 17k chip lead, but more than, with an extreme feeling of deja vu. Surf and I just played heads-up for the Mookie last Wednesday, and now here we were again, again with me starting heads-up play with a nice chip lead, but hopefully this one would end differently from the Mook where I lost my chip lead on one big drawing hand and gave up my chance to win my first Mookie title. I was more determined than ever to not let this one slip away.

I think I basically sealed this one up on this hand, when I reraised Surf on the flop here with just a draw although I figured quite possibly the best hand with King-high:



and he folded:



So obviously Surf did have nothing here, as I'm sure at those pot odds he calls even with Ace-high, but the good news was that this hand left him down with just under 7k in chips to my 80k+, and I knew it would take a miracle for me to eff this up. Two hands later came the final hand, my KTo calling allin against Surf's hopeful Hammer, but the King on the flop sealed the hand, and I had won my fifth MATH tournament of the year.

In the end, congratulations to all of our cashers this week: Katiemother in 4th place for $83.52, swimmom95 in 3rd for $125.28, and Surf in second place for $174 after another nice run for the guy who was just saying in his blog that he feels his tournament game is really "dialed in" right now. I have to say I feel just the same way, as I took down the MATH and the $313.20 first prize on the night in my own right, and had a blast doing it along the way.

So here are your updated 2007 MATH moneyboard standings including this week's tournament:

1. Bayne_s $1175
2. Columbo $1168
3. Hoyazo $1162
4. VinNay $775
5. cmitch $774
6. Iggy $745
7. NewinNov $677
8. Pirate Wes $672
9. Lucko21 $665
10. Waffles $650
11. Astin $616
12. Tripjax $561
13. IslandBum1 $527
14. RaisingCayne $522
15. Julius Goat $507
16. bartonf $492
16. mtnrider81 $492
18. PokerBrian322 $490
19. Chad $485
20. scots_chris $474
21. Fuel55 $458
22. Mike_Maloney $456
23. RecessRampage $434
24. Otis $429
25. Miami Don $402
26. jeciimd $382
26. Jordan $382
28. Blinders $379
29. lightning36 $371
30. ChapelncHill $353
31. Zeem $330
32 oossuuu754 $312
33. leftylu $295
34. Emptyman $288
34. Wigginx $288
36. ScottMc $282
37. Fishy McDonk $277
38. Irongirl $252
38. Manik79 $252
40. Wippy1313 $248
41. swimmom95 $245
42. Byron $234
43. wwonka69 $216
44. Omega_man_99 $210
45. Pushmonkey72 $208
46. Buddydank $197
47. 23Skidoo $176
48. Surflexus $174
49. Santa Clauss $170
50. Iakaris $162
50. Smokkee $162
52. cemfredmd $156
52. NumbBono $156
54. lester000 $147
55. LJ $146
56. Heffmike $145
57. brdweb $143
58. DDionysus $137
59. Patchmaster $135
60. InstantTragedy $129
61. Ganton516 $114
62. Fluxer $110
63. hoops15mt $95
64. Gracie $94
64. Scurvydog $94
66. katiemother $84
66. Shag0103 $84
68. crazdgamer $82
69. PhinCity $80
70. maf212 $78
71. Alceste $71
71. dbirider $71
73. Easycure $67
74. Rake Feeder $53

So congratulations to katiemother and to Surf for clawing their ways on to the 2007 moneyboard for the first time, as well as to swimmom who jumps up 41st place overall with her second cash in the recent past. And with my win this week, check out that logjam up at the top of the moneyboard right now in those first three spots: we've got recent Hoy-killers Bayne, Columbo and myself all separated by a total of only $13. Wow. Looks like it's gonna be a close race as we head out of the summer months to see who can end 2007 atop the moneyboard, and right now it is still anyone's game. Thank you to everyone who came out to play in the MATH this week, and I look forward to another fun (and profitable) time next Monday night at 10pm ET on full tilt!

Turning Back to SNGs, and My Fantasy Football Invitation

Thursday night did not start out like I expected. Hammerwife had told me over the phone earlier in the day that she had banged her toe really hard and was in a lot of pain. She normally has a high tolerance for pain so I figured something was up, but I was not prepared for what I saw when I walked in from the office on Thursday evening. Hammerwife's two outside toes on her right foot had gone basically completely purple, and she really could not walk, pretty much at all. She's going to be fine, but it definitely put me on the clock for bedtime duties with the Hammer girls. And then my wife was in such bad shape that I went and got her some of her favorite ice cream in the city for a late-night snack too. The toes look even worse here on Friday, but I think she will be ok after a couple weeks' worth of healing. I had two brothers close-ish in age to me and spent innumerable hours running all around the house I grew up in, so I've broken my share of toes and I know how painful that all can be. But Hammerwife is a real trooper. Wouldn't she have to be to put up with me for almost six years and counting?

All that is to say that I never got to play my usual poker slate for a Thursday night. Instead I didn't even get to look at my computer until sometime after 10pm, and I took a quick perusal of what mtts were available and who was online at the time. This was when I saw The King. Chad was at his newest poker focus -- multitabling sngs. I don't know how Chad does it, but the guy was literally playing in ten sitngos at once when I first sat down to full tilt on Thursday, and doing pretty well in mostly all of them. That guy is a machine. But as I looked over the 10:30pm and after slate of mtts, given that I can't play in any more of the FTOPS events and I can't start a huge mtt like Midnight Madness too late because of my own sleep needs, there just really isn't anything up my alley at that specific time. I thought about playing some nl cash, but for whatever reason I just didn't feel quite like that. In the end, I found myself inspired by the King, and I opened up two sitngos of my own, a format of poker that I haven't played seriously in almost two years now.

I've told this story here on the blog before, but when my college buddy V first got me in to online poker, it was over at pokerstars and that was when all I used to play were sngs. All sngs, all the time. I don't think I ever even sniffed a bona fide multi-table tournament until probably I had played (and lost) sngs on pokerstars for a good 4 or 5 months. The way V explained it to me, the sngs were where the real profits were at, and I took him for his word because I was completely new to this whole poker-on-the-internets thing. I played sngs maybe 5 or 6 nights a week with V, and scored well in several of them, but take it from me if you've never been an sng grinder before -- the shit gets old very quickly. Quicker than you think, you look down and you've busted on the bubble or in the middle of the table 5 of your last 6 or 8 of your last 10, and it's because it is just incredibly difficult to keep up the required focus over a span of only and all sngs over a period of weeks or months. Trust me. I'll be surprised if even KOD can keep this up for more than a month. Grinding out sng's sucks in my book, even if it is, as some bloggers and non-bloggers maintain, the most consistently and formulaically beatable form of poker.

Anyways, long story short I fired up a $55 turbo sng and a $110 turbo sng, with the $110 buyin representing the largest individual buyin sng I have ever played. I had no idea what the quality of play would be like in these things, but given my increased success as I have moved up in limits in nlh cash games and mtts, I definitely believe that my greatest chance for consistent sng success would also be at limits above the $5 and $10 sngs or really anything near there. And, I am happy to say, I think I proved that hypothesis last night, at least to the extent that a whopping sample size of two whole sngs can prove something. Generally speaking, the play int he $55 sng was just about the same as what I run into in, say the first few rounds of a donkfest like the nightly 28k guaranteed at 10pm ET on full tilt. Nothing more, nothing less. I didn't see a single "fancy" play that impressed me throughout that event, and it even came replete with the requisite donkey who pushed in an allin reraise preflop with what turned out to be KTo on the very first hand of the 9-person tournament that pays the top three spots. I made it pretty far, lasting to 3rd place before being called allin by AK with my 99 and losing to an Ace on the flop, netting me about a $50 profit in the process.

The $110 sng was even more fun, and once again I have to say that I saw absolutely no discernible difference between the level of play in that event and that in the early rounds of the normal mtts and mtt satellites that I play in regularly. Yep, that's right, even at the $110 buyin level at 11pm at night in a single-table sng, I still found the play to be pretty damned ordinary and totally beatable. I busted a guy who had top pair Ten kicker when I flopped a set of 3s, and I knocked out another guy who pushed allin with just overs on a raggy flop after raising it up preflop. I did suck out one time, against another guy whose play I can't classify as anything but mediocre at best. In that hand I called a preflop raise into a 4-handed pot with the sooooted Mookie -- T8 of diamonds -- the flop came J82 with two diamonds. With middle pair, a weak backdoor straight draw and a flush draw, I figured I was ok to push hard here, as long as I was the one retaining a lot of fold equity by making the big pressure bet with however the hand played itself out.

On this flop, my opponent bet largeish into an already largeish pot thanks to four players calling a preflop 4x raise, and I opted to go for the massive allin overpush, hoping for a fold but fine if he calls as well since I have a large number of outs -- at least 9 flush cards and 2 eights as sure outs, and probably 3 more Jacks as well for a total of 14 outs, or basically a 50-50 shot to win the hand if we see it through a showdown. The guy thought about five seconds and called me with KJ. Top pair second kicker for all his chips fairly early on in a single-table sng with a $110 buyin. Bad play, so when he was ahead on the flop but then lost to my 8 on the turn, he didn't get sucked out on like the guy would later claim in the observer chat. He was roughly a 50-50 shot when he called off his entire stack with TP2K, and as far as I'm concerned, he got what he deserved when he called off with just one pair and not even top kicker. What did he think I was reraising him allin with here? Bottom pair and no part of the flush draw? Getting allin against a guy with a flush draw is an awesome idea, as long as you're the one pushing allin for a big raise and putting the drawing hand to a decision for all his chips. Calling allin early in a $110 buyin sng against a guy who likely has double-digit outs against you, that is just dumbo poker.

Anyways, long story short, I won about $50 in the $55 sng, and then this in the $110 sng:



Blammo!! First real-life sngs in about 22 months, and I profited about $450 for not more than an hour's worth of work. These were turbo sngs, after all, a particular type of donkey poker, but controllable if you know how to be aggressive and how to make plays and make moves on people when you are strong and/or they are weak. I have learned from my forays into shorthanded nl cash games that I really enjoy the metagame aspects and importance played on hand reading and on testicular fortitude that is brought forth by the levels I play, and I find the turbo sng format actually helps to replicate that atmo to some extent, forcing the action and requiring people to make some moves with less than stellar hands to much the same resulting tournament atmosphere as you see in the short cash games where stealing and restealing play such a large role. Anyways, other than the $10 rebuy mtt which I bought into 4 times I think before auto-busting when I was falling asleep shortly after midnight after two days of up late winning money at poker, that was my night, to the tune of a total profit of around $400. I'll take it, can I have some more please?!

OK guys, before I sign off for the weekend, I wanted to do the same thing that I did roughly a year ago today here at the blog and extend an invitation to a couple of you out there who might be interested in playing in my fantasy football league, called the Baker League, this season. For those of you who do not know, I have hosted my own fantasy football league for the past 6 or 7 years, including the last 4 or 5 on Yahoo!. I blogged about it quite a bit last year and I'm sure will again this year, but in the past we have not played for money and instead have focused mainly on playing for pride and bragging rights. I may entertain a money buyin to this year's league, although personally I don't need a buyin to keep things interesting for me, and I imagine I will spend some time over the next five months writing about my trials and tribulations on my way to a league title in January.

So here's the scoop on my league for anyone who is interested: the deadline to sign up for the league is today, Friday, because the live online draft for my league takes place tomorrow morning, Saturday 8-18, at 10am ET. I have approximately 2 or 3 spots open in what I always cap at a 10-team maximum league, and I would absolutely love to have you join in the fun. The only rules are that I am definitely looking for people who will stay in the league and stay involved all the way through the NFL season, as opposed to quitdonks who lose a tough game and then sit all their players out or stop adjusting for bye weeks and matchups halfway through the year. So I'm looking for all-season guys, and you have to be either available tomorrow morning (Saturday) at 10am ET for the draft, or available to pre-rank your players before that time. And, of course, you have to sign up by tonight, Friday evening, or you will miss the deadline.

So, anyone out there who is interested, all you have to do is follow the simple instructions below, and do it right now because the first 2 or 3 people who follow these instructions today will be the only ones who can fit into the league:

I have created a Custom Yahoo! Fantasy Football League named Baker League IV and the team called StockLab in that league.

To join this league, click over to Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football and sign up to join a Custom League.

The League ID# is 198756 and the Password is eagles.

The live online draft for this league will take place on Satury August 18 10:00am EDT. If you choose to participate in the live draft, please arrive at the draft 10 minutes ahead of the scheduled time. The draft will start promptly and may conclude rapidly if only a few managers are logged in.


So come on out and check out my fantasy football league -- last year two lucky readers had the pleasue of regular ass-beatings by me off the virtual poker felt in addition the ones they were already receiving on it, and one thing I can promise you about my annual fantasy football league is it is always a lot of fun. And you will probably get to read about yourself here in the blog every week as well as I'll be delighting you all with fabulous fantasy football bad beat stories, fully sans payment of any $1 fines for such charming anecdotes. But you gotta get in there today, as the draft in Saturday morning 10am.

No more FTOPS for me as I only ended up playing in the two events I was most interested in. This weekend is, well, the weekend, and even the ME on Sunday will have to be a no-go for me this time around as I am out at a wedding on Sunday evening. But otherwise I should be online at various points throughout the weekend as I look to continue a very hot 4 or 5 weeks for me on the cash game, tournament and now I can add the sitngo circuit. Best of luck this weekend and hopefully we all get to take in some more of the wonderful thing known as preseason NFL football games.