First hand at a Sit & Go
Quite recently I was playing a cheap Sit & Go tournament online.
It was a 6 handed No Limit Texas Holdem ‘Turbo’ game. ‘Turbo’ means that the blinds go up twice as fast; as you can read in poker glossary this means every minute the blinds go up. I like it that way because it takes me a shorter amount of time to win the money and start another one. 
So I sat down, clicked the ‘I am ready’ button and I was all set for some serious folding for the first few minutes. I’ll explain why in a later tip…
The blinds were 15/30 and I started in the big blind.
The first hand I got was AA. Nice way to begin, I figured. The guy in second position made a pretty standard raise of twice the big blind; 60 to go. Nothing to get all worked up about because you don’t win the tournament in the first hand, but you CAN lose it there. So a lot of callers when it came back to me and I obviously decided to raise it up a little. I made it 120. First position folded, the original raiser went all-in everybody else folded except me, I obviously called even though I don’t like to do that the first hand.
He must have been sick to his stomach when I showed my aces because he had been unlucky enough to catch kings that first hand. There was nothing wrong with the way he played his kings, except for the timing.
The board brought nothing and so I -more than- doubled up before I had even played any serious hand.
So I was stack leader from the very first beginning but eventually I didn’t even end up in the money. I finished an unfair third position, one place short…
If there is anything to learn from this it should be this: Be careful when risking all of your chips on the first hand because you can’t win the tournament there. Even if you play it the right way. You should just take it easy and try to make it to the money playing premium hands only. Don’t play expensive games early on, unless you’ve got the nuts (or close to it).
Posted
on
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 8:37 am under
You’ve drawn the wrong lesson here. The fact that you din’t make the money has nothing to do with the way you played the first hand; it it has to do with the way you played other hands during the tournament. Of course, it’s true that you can’t win the tournament on the first hand. But you can - and you certainly did - put yourself in a superior position for the rest of the tournament. But if you failed to take advantage of that superior position later in the tournament, that doesn’t mean you should have played the first hand differently. If means you should have played the other hands that led to your failing to make the money differently.
(By the way, you must have an excessively stringent notion of “premium hands” if AA doesn’t count as a premium hand.)
April 18th, 2008 at 4:12 pmYou’re absolutely right, the fact that I didn’t make it to the money had nothing to do with that first hand (in fact I got suckerd with the second best set of trips on the bubble).
The fact remains, however, that this guy had risked all of his chips on a hand where he was not in a position to win the tournament. And neither was I for that matter, even though I new I had the best of it.
And yes, I will play pocket aces from any position - especially heads up - any day of the week. For breakfast. The lesson to be learned should be that, yes, you should play hands like that (of course, if you don’t play aces or kings you might as well quit playing poker at all), you should just try to play them more conservatively in the early stages of the tournament.
Besides, if there was any lesson to this particular hand, it would be for the other player, not for me. This guy should not have moved in on me at that particulair moment in the tournament. He should have made a decent re-raise and laid it down after I had raised him all in - and trust me, that would have happend.
So for the sake for the sake of correctness I’ve changed the lesson from ‘don’t risk’ to ‘be careful when risking’. That is indeed a better way to put it.
Thanks for commenting,
Elgar
August 11th, 2008 at 10:41 am