My idea on which tournaments to play

Tournament structures vs Your strengths

Okay, I've been playing awhile now. I've tried massive MTT's, I've tried smaller tournaments. I don't play for large money, the most I pay is $10 for a tournament entry fee but I think I've finally realized some things about my play and perhaps you can use them.

I suppose to start I should look at the tournament itself. How many people are in it? Well if it's less than 45 I don't see the point. I play an occasiona 45 man SnG on Stars but don't generally do that well. My personal favorite are tournaments that have 500+ people in them but that you only have to beat a few of them to win.

How does that work?

There are shootout tournaments running all the time on Stars and perhaps the other sites, I mainly play on Stars so I can't say what FT or Ultimatebet has. In a shooutout tournament the object is to defeat the players at your table, what anyone on another table does has no effect on you or how the tournament itself plays out longterm. Since it's just you vs the table, essentially it's a SnG with the caveat that, in general, you have to win the table to get any gain.

Let's take the $2.20 Quintuple Shootout as an example. It's a 1024 person entry field, usually full. Yet to get in the money you need only defeat 6 of those entrants. That's right, beat 6 people, you're in the money. If you don't think you can beat 6 people it's time to stop playing poker. You beat 6 people you get $10, should you beat 3 more people, you get $45 and then you're at the final table with, yes, 3 more people.

So to win this entire tournament, with 1024 entrants, you need only beat 15 of them.

I think what I like best about these types of tournaments is that you don't need to concern yourself with anyone else's chip counts. So what if one person has a donk filled table? At the end of each round, the chip counts reset back to 1500 for the next round, the blinds are reset. It's like round 1 never happened.

Now, how have I done on these?

I've never made final table. I've made the $45 table twice, the $10 table twice, I think and I may have played it 20 times.

There are other shooutouts on Stars, the main one is a $3.30 triple shootout every night, 729 entrants. There's also the double shootouts that run as satellites to the different events on Stars. I'm going to play in a few of the Sunday Million ones once the whole WSOP furor has died off.

There are a lot of WSOP shootouts to get in the $370 200 seat tournament, if you're into that it might be worth the money, they go from $4.40 to $26 entry fees.

That's just my idea, let me know what you think.

there's something for everyone on stars. shootouts don't work that well for me, because although I feel I have an edge @H-U and i have more than enough stats to back that up, lets just say I'm 55-60% in a TURBO (much less skill @ H-U section) - it comes down to a crapshoot.

i was mostly disappointed w/ my first time trying the $5.50 replay one last night. I've had one replay w/ hole cards revealed on me before in a private tournament and I would LOVE another. First table I made it to H-U with a 4.5k stack (me) vs 8.5k stack (him). blinds were huge, i think 3-6. Either way, we blinded each other like 3-4 hands, I raise on AJo.. with those kind of blinds raise = committed. He held AA and put me all in --> i had no choice but to call. i realize fully that had the hole cards been swapped, it still would have been an all in pf on both sides. Although I love the idea of getting more replay footage, turbo shootouts just don't work for me.

still though, the idea that you need to beat 10-15 people in a shootout applies most directly to a tournament as well. if you knock out 10-15 decently stacked individuals in a tournament, you will most likely get very close to winning. i don't believe that is the difference. i believe the major difference w/ shootouts are the ability to adjust to lessening players at the table (i.e. sng skillz) and playing short handed, as well as dealing with chip stacks more frequently in tournaments.

GL@ the tables