Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The Kiddie Games Down The Street
I was going to change my Facebook status to "Andy is playing the kiddie games down the street", but fortunately I realised that, to someone unaware of the reference [1], this might look a bit disturbing. It would have been quite apposite though in a poker sense. Since coming home from Vegas I have been playing intermittently and mostly poorly. This week though, I have noticed that all of a sudden (or at least since I last looked which was a few months ago) there are enough playable tournaments kicking off around noon to make a mid-day session a viable option.
Clearly these tournaments are aimed at generating action from the Asian markets ; Eurobet's noon offering is even billed as the "Chinese Daily". What's for sure is that all of them are super soft, and the 100 runner, $1800 first prize kind of line-ups constitute a decent slice of value. I'm playing these in a style which I call "old-school Tribeca". It's how I used to play on the old Tribeca network, where you basically get called far, far more often than you should. The pre-flop raise, continutation bet style is a great way of murdering chips without a hand, whereas with a big pair all you have to do is build it and they will come. AK and AQ become great hands to limp with pre-flop with quite a wide stack range ; if raised, you can basically shove or pass pre-flop, if no one raises then you simply farm it when you hit and fold when you don't. Outright stealing you basically forget about except around the bubble, when you do it based on stacks and your own cards are pretty much irrelevant.
My biggest problem lately, prior to switching to these games, has been losing too many of the "miss the flop in a raised pot" confrontations, frequently after committing even more chips. Playing in these tournaments where I can keep the pre-flop pot smaller and still safely commit with TPTK against multiple opponents (there is an element of the PNLHE ethos at work here) is much more suited to my style. So I'm going to plug away at these for a while, and possibly try this out in the odd Sunday special as well, where the field is qualifier-rich. I'm very lucky in one respect. I'm not one of these people who "wants to play against better players". I'm perfectly happy beating up eggs, and I have no problem playing a fairly mechanical game against bad players. I much prefer it to chasing marginal edges against tougher opposition. Thanks to the attempted expansion into the Asian markets, there are some decent kiddie games down the street for me to play in right now.
[1] I expect everyone on here is aware, but if you aren't, it's a favourite saying of Matusow's when one of his high-risk Russian Roulette moves does not result in the "Matusow blow-up", or inevitable long-term result as it is known to everyone else.
Clearly these tournaments are aimed at generating action from the Asian markets ; Eurobet's noon offering is even billed as the "Chinese Daily". What's for sure is that all of them are super soft, and the 100 runner, $1800 first prize kind of line-ups constitute a decent slice of value. I'm playing these in a style which I call "old-school Tribeca". It's how I used to play on the old Tribeca network, where you basically get called far, far more often than you should. The pre-flop raise, continutation bet style is a great way of murdering chips without a hand, whereas with a big pair all you have to do is build it and they will come. AK and AQ become great hands to limp with pre-flop with quite a wide stack range ; if raised, you can basically shove or pass pre-flop, if no one raises then you simply farm it when you hit and fold when you don't. Outright stealing you basically forget about except around the bubble, when you do it based on stacks and your own cards are pretty much irrelevant.
My biggest problem lately, prior to switching to these games, has been losing too many of the "miss the flop in a raised pot" confrontations, frequently after committing even more chips. Playing in these tournaments where I can keep the pre-flop pot smaller and still safely commit with TPTK against multiple opponents (there is an element of the PNLHE ethos at work here) is much more suited to my style. So I'm going to plug away at these for a while, and possibly try this out in the odd Sunday special as well, where the field is qualifier-rich. I'm very lucky in one respect. I'm not one of these people who "wants to play against better players". I'm perfectly happy beating up eggs, and I have no problem playing a fairly mechanical game against bad players. I much prefer it to chasing marginal edges against tougher opposition. Thanks to the attempted expansion into the Asian markets, there are some decent kiddie games down the street for me to play in right now.
[1] I expect everyone on here is aware, but if you aren't, it's a favourite saying of Matusow's when one of his high-risk Russian Roulette moves does not result in the "Matusow blow-up", or inevitable long-term result as it is known to everyone else.
# posted by Andy_Ward @ 4:41 PM 
