Altering Strategy Late a in Multi-Winner Satellite Tourny

[lwestatbus]

I was in a $2.20 Stars satellite to the Sunday Hundred Grand. Started with about 130 players and the top 23 paid. As we got down to 33 players I was in a precarious but not impossible position and as the play progressed I kept thinking about the ten players who needed to drop by the wayside for me to "cash" and hoping I wasn't one of them. That got me to thinking about my strategy.

I had about 4k chips with blinds at 300/600. Blinds were going up regularly and I was pretty confident that I wasn't going to be able to fold my way into the win. But that got me to thinking that I could conserve my chips if I got more of them.

I played "normal" late stage tourny poker with my stack size, position (and my position relative to aggressiveness and stack sizes at my table--not really the point of this post but I was watching), and cards. I had one great hand show up at the right time that doubled me up (back up to the 4.5k range after having dropped some blinds with crappola).

Anyway, I distinctly threw away any strategy associated with winning (=coming in first). There was no first place as these tournaments end when the final 23 are left. I realized that I didn't need to do any of the following:

1. Build my chip stack to survive when the blinds got to 500/1,000 or more.

2. Build my chip stack to bully, or maximize the payoff from a really great hand.

3. Take small stacks out of the tourny.

4. Take out small stacks and build my stack to get deeper into the payout structure--all winners paid the same.

I basically realized that the best strategy was to stay out of any hand that I wasn't willing to go all in with pre flop. Here are a couple of opportunities I stayed out of:

1. A short stack (half of my 4k stack) is all in to my pocket sevens.

2. Two players calling the blinds and me with AJ offsuit (I'm down to 3k and blinds are at 400/800.)

It was very interesting to watch which big stack players seemed to have adopted a similar strategy. There was one guy with a monster stack who was running on auto pilot. He was trying to blind steal against other big stacks for no real purpose.

[xDiamond_CutteRx]

Normally in late stage tournaments, a "survival" strategy is not a big money maker. But in satellites, it's the only thing that matters. Mostly, you just have to play your position in the tournament, mindful of where the short stacks are, as you are only a round or two from elimination yourself.