By lakong on October 15th, 2007 (more posts by author)

I had registered for the Pokerstars free-roll blog championship. The tournament started at 12pm CA time, but we had plans to at 12:15 and wouldn't be back for about 3 hours. That gave me 15 minutes to play like a complete maniac and see what I could do with my stack. I figured if I could double or triple my stack size, I might have something left when I returned.

We started with 10k in chips and just went at it from the first hand. For example, on the first hand a guy raises to 150 and there were 3 callers. I quickly made it 3k to go and took it down. This type of thing happened for the first orbit and I was sitting with 16k. So I had substantially increased my stack with no regard for what hand I had and without ever going past the flop. Of course someone could have woken up with a hand, but I tried to feel it out and determine to the best I could when people were hedging their bets.

I then called a raise with 66 and flopped trips. I made pot sized bets against one opponent, but the river brought both the flush and straight possibilities so when he checked to me on the river I checked too. Of course he got there so I was back down to 11k. No problem, within the next orbit I got back up to 19k. That's when my wife came in and told me we had to go. i didn't think a 19k stack was enough to last until I got back, so now I decided to push on every hand until I got called hoping to suck out.

I raised or re-raised all-in on 4 consecutive hands. On the 4th hand a guy called me with AT. I had only 97, but wasn't that far behind. He won the hand and I kept doing it again while my wife yelled from the car for me to join her! I got into two more 40/60 type all-ins and lost them both and I was put out of my misery for good!

Anyway, the moral of the story is that if I actually played like a maniac, BUT had a bit more control it would have really been interesting. I assume this is the way a lot of the better tournament players do it. They start off very, very aggressive to try and build a stack quickly. In this case if I didn't need to do the all-in trick and simply kept on pushing the edges when I knew that guys were not willing to take chances early on, I would have had no problem doubling or even tripling my stack fairly quickly.