Damning the River

Decided to treat myself to a 5-1 sit-n-go NL Hold’em on Party.  I haven’t played many sit-n-gos – mainly, I’ve worked with my simulator and played some live ones, watched my friend play the sit-n-gos on Party a bit, but never played them myself.

I try, early on, to limp with a variety of mediocre hands when I’m in middle-late or late position.  In early, I’ll only limp with some better hands – I take Sklansky’s advice that hands like AJo and 88 you shouldn’t really be raising with a lot of the time, because you’re going to “hate” a reraise.  As he says, you don’t want to turn those hands into 72 – perhaps raise with those worse hands to try to steal if you can.  However, from what I’ve seen of Party sit-n-gos, trying to raise for steals early on isn’t really effective.  Anyway, from this I manage to get my role up to about 850 or so after the first round or so.

Big trouble spot for me tonight: I limp with J7s suited from the button with 2 others in.  Flop comes JT7 rainbow.  It’s the 15/30 round and the big blind bets 275 into the 90 pot. I called here, then folded when an 8 hit on the turn and he bet 325.  He could have had anything from JT, to just a 9, and wasn’t really sure what to put him on. He could have just had AJo, but I wasn’t ready to basically put my tournament life on the line this early. Maybe I should have been, as I was down to about 525.

I didn’t really have many good limping opportunties after that, with raises behind me or just plain shit cards – maybe I should have tried to sneaking in more with those. Certainly didn’t have any strong raising hands, though I could have gone for steals, of course. 

In any case, it got to the point where I had just about 350 left from being blinded down, with about 2 hands left in the 25/50 round.  Once the blinds go up again, I will not be in good shape. I came in from the small blind with K8o to a pot of about 200.  Flop was KT6 with two of same suit, one heart.  I decided to push here, given that I’d been so quiet that people would give me credit for it – I would be perfectly content with that. But someone had limped with TT, and quickly called.  There goes my tournament, out in 8th.

Hardest thing for me about playing these is that I don’t get a good sense of how well I played – it’s even harder for me to get that long run sense here.  With .5/1 now, I see my mistakes much more readily – I can make fewer of them, and, when I make them, I notice them either in real time or definitely when reviewing my hand histories.  But I don’t know what I learned in particular from tonight.  The hand with J7 really took a hit out of my stack and I really feel like I didn’t have enough of a clue of what to do.  Even if I made the right decision (not saying I did, particularly given I didn’t have a good enough read on the guy), I don’t feel comfortable enough in the decision I made to feel good about how I played overall.

Anyway: tips are welcome – any especially notable poker blogger posts on playing sit-n-gos?  Send ’em my way.

Filed by at 9:18 pm under dtrStories
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