Speculative Hands Early in Tourny

[lwestatbus]

I came across an interesting thought on NL tournys in the latest issue of Card Player Magazine (January 22, 08).

Resolve to see more flops early:...Most tournaments with three-figure or larger buy-ins give you plenty of chips to start. This means you can see many more flops, in hope of hitting a miracle and building a large stack early. Several highly successful tournament pros budget between one-third and one-half of their stacks early in an event for speculation. If they do not hit a flop or win some chips they slow down and wait for a more traditional opportunity.

He goes on to argue that an early success finances further speculation as well as settling down opponents when they play against you.

This is a pretty interesting idea. Does anyone else play this way? Any thoughts on this idea?

[ninetensuited]

bingo.

[PokerGoddessAndHSmom]

Harrington on hold-em suggests the opposite. He suggests very tight, conservative early play. He does mention the theory/strategy of "seeing more flops" early but basically concludes the payoff for making junk hands is minimal compared to the risk to your bankroll.

[xDiamond_CutteRx]

Harrington on hold-em suggests the opposite. He suggests very tight, conservative early play. He does mention the theory/strategy of "seeing more flops" early but basically concludes the payoff for making junk hands is minimal compared to the risk to your bankroll.

See, I think the misperception here is that we're advocating just bluffing like crazy with no hand. When I usually talk about taking chances early, I mean seeing a lot of flops with suited connectors, suited aces, and small pairs, as well as a few worse in position--it also means playing draws very aggressively, trying to pick up chips, and not being afraid to gamble a little with the smaller stacks. Early on, when stacks are still deep enough to take some flops and bank on implied odds, it's usually OK to play "speculative" hands, whereas in the later stages you're folding most of these hands because the implied odds required to make them profitable simply aren't there.

I'm in the Barry Greenstein school of thought that says it's probably better to make the money 10% of the time but have a bunch of top 3 finishes, versus a bunch of small cashes like 50% of the time. The philosophy of sitting back and waiting for hands, trying to eke out a small profit, is not conducive to winning tournament play IMHO.

[MrDarling]

its a great style but you have to be much better post flop then the rest of the table for this to work.
Also this will not really work that well in normal online MTT where you only start with 50BB...

I'm a usual MTT nit, but the other day decided to experiment with that, 2 hands :

Hand 1 I over limp on the BTN with 35s along with 4/5 other

flop is 358r, SB donk the pot. I raise he calls. turn is a blank 4 he check calls my AI with A5o and of course river a 4 to bust me..

Hand 2 I limp on the BTN with 9To in Deep stack tournament 3rd hand. Flop is a pretty 678r. SB donk into 5 I flat call. I make a big raise on a blank turn and he calls. Then he open push river 7 and I hate it and fold.