Champions of Poker

Luckily I won a seat at the upcoming no limit tourney to be held in Regina, Sk. Canada. The buy in I heard is $1000 and I’m glad as it is going to be on TV. But I’m now bothered as I badly want to win the gold. How should I play then?

To make things clearer, there are two stages. In the first stage, to be able to start out, you need $10,000 in chips. The blind time will be 40 mins and the blinds will begin at 25 / 50. Antes I heard will begin at level 9. The tourney will run for three days and every day only 350 players can play. If you belong to the top 10% at the end of a certain day, you can proceed to the next stage. However, if you lose you can re-buy for the next day. Unfortunately, if it happens that you lose the third day, then sorry as you are already out. In the second stage, everyone will be in the money and approximately 105 will be fighting for the first place with a whooping $350,000 prize. About the chips, well if you have many chips left after passing on the first stage, good for you as it will be accumulated at this stage. However, no deals are prohibited and everyone will be playing on and on till one player remains.

Now, what day do you think should I play? And do you have any strategy in mind to share with me? Please, I hope I could use it for stage one and stage two.

Thank you very much for your time.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Benz
Benz,

First, this is an odd tournament structure. As far as which day, it depends on your style of play. If you are very aggressive and can accumulate chips, the last day may work as the most players typically play that day. If you are tighter, I would play the first two days and loosen your starting hand requirements some.

You need to be in the top 35 at the end of the day. As a result, you need to build up chips. This means playing looser than normal and taking a few more risks. Try and build chips by stealing blind, taking advantage of weaker players, and seeing a lot of flops and punishing when you hit the flop well.

If you won your seat for this tournament, then great, go ahead and play. I wouldn’t play it otherwise.

Hello,

I’ll start by sharing that I love to play a lot of online tourneys with play money because I’m not yet ready to lose with real money.

In one of the tourneys I was able to participate in, something happened. I remember we started with approximately 3000 players and the starting stack was 3000 chips. At the start, I was seriously tight.

At mid part of the game, about 1000 players were left. I remember that point, the average chip count of all players was always beyond my stack. So I’m curious, is there any sense at all to continue playing when you are just at your starting chip count and then blinds go to 400/800 and antes then kick in?

And another thing, do you think I played too tight at the start? How about going out early to have a good chip count, should I have done it?

Thanks and great site!

Regards,
Thorsten
Thorsten,

As long as you have chips, you are still capable of winning. Freeroll tournaments are tournaments that you need to either try and gamble a lot early to win chips, or you need to push your strong hands almost hyper aggressively.

In freerolls with large fields, I would try and pick up chips early as I can to have a shot to win. With me, I will usually push with any pair or any reasonable hand like A-K or A-Q. These are freerolls. If you bust out first, you lose the same as everyone else, and that’s nothing.