Feb 14

Re: to a friend who mentioned bluffing

Bluffing is almost worthless until you get down to 15 or so people in a 90 person tournament. Even then, you can only bluff people who are playing well. I sort of pick them out. I've even started putting notes on good players. You can tell when people have noticed that you only play good hands.

If you play the 9 or 18 player games, the play is quite a bit more solid. I've only played one $2,000 game (90 players), but it had solid(er) play as well.

Both my account have enough for a $10k game, so I'll try one of those when I feel I can sit down and concentrate.

My online strategy:
I usually go all-in the first hand. I used to feel guilty when people just called the first hand and I spoil their play by going all-in, but they should know the way things work on hand #1.
Let's say I win 1/4-1/5 of those (my luck has been much better than that lately). That pretty much guarantees me that I can fold my way to even money. Plus I'll occasionally get pocket K's and such that I can use to double my chip stack along the way, pretty much guaranteeing a profit if I fold every hand.
So I'll start one game, and once I have a nice chip stack I'll start another game and do the same thing. Then I just monitor the two games for good hands.
If I had DSL and a larger screen I'd probably go to 4 games.

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I'm steaming. The schmuck to my left likes to challenge people. He went all-in a few times with hands like KT and sucked out a victory.

I was waiting for my chance to double up though him.

I had AJ suited so I made a big raise, he re-raised, I re-raised, so he went all-in and I called.

He had KJ off and the flop had 5Q3. Crap. Excellent for me.
The turn was an Ace.
The river was a 10, giving him the straight. UGH!

There was over 55k in that pot, and he took me out. It sucked.
I only got 6th place, which about covers the other games I lost tonight.