Sunday, November 12, 2006

FullTilt Tournament series

So FullTilt Poker has a series of tournaments called the FTOPS running right now. It's basically a tournament a day and most cost $216 to enter with the final even being around $500. They have Holdem, Omaha, and Razz to spice things up. I took on the first No Limit holdem event this afternoon and worked my way from over 3000 players down to 1400.

I got placed at I think the most aggressive table I've ever seen and didn't know how to combat properly. I'd say 90% of the pots were raised preflop. Out of 120 hands I saw 6 flops! and only won 1 of those. I won 5 hands preflop by raising when no one else had raised before me and 2 hands reraising out of the blinds from a button raise and smallblind raise. The average stack was hovering around 40 big blinds for most of my play which leaves a halfway decent amount of play but when I got down to about 9 big blinds from basically being blinded off (the antes were kicked in at this point), I decided to raise from the button with 7,2... garbage of course but since not many pots weren't being raised preflop, I took the shot while I had it. The 2 people in the blinds weren't calling many big raises either. Suprisingly, I got called by 4,2 and lost. He said, "I thought I had an ace" and apparently decided to call off 90% of his stack with it. Boy does this call illustrate a nice piece of dead money in the tournament. Even if he had an A,2 or A,4 he would AT BEST be a 60% to 40% favorite and could very well be a huge doge if I had A,J or similar. I'm not sure about you but those aren't exactly the odds I'm looking for to call off most of my stack. I'd personally rather take a much weaker hand and raise hoping for a "no contest".

Although I usually like to wait for a better hand than 7,2, I wasn't going to get many shots at an unopened pot. Should I have opened up my preflop reraising standards to try to pick off some of those "light on values" raises? I'm not sure yet... Or should I start calling with good position relative to the raiser with some weaker or possibly dominated hands? 75% of the hands ended up being no flop or heads up with a raiser and one caller. This was certainly the most tight/aggressive table I've ever seen and hope to see the more normal passive/loose table next time around.