blonde poker forum

Knowing that SNGs were his speciality, I asked the 'The Dean' Carl Sampson to give us some SNG based material, and he duly obliged.

His latest article is about whether to push an ultra short-stack in the latter stages of a SNG or wait for the big blind to hit. Give it a read, food for thought at least...

http://blondepoker.com/?q=node/23216 (http://blondepoker.com/?q=node/23216)

Agree/disagree?

Meh i agree i wouldn't push atc utg here but it is a case of picking the best hand to run with here, so i will shove the top 50 % of my hands from utg here.

I am not sure what high stakes sngs The Dean has been playing but people do not gang on the short stack 5 handed, why would they? Good players are a lot more likely to isolate the utg raisor, as this increases your EV and gets the pot heads up. Or alternatively fold unless they are in the bb who has a mandatory call with atc. No one is going to put in between a 1/5 and 1/3 of their stack here trying to gang up on the shortie 5 handed, unless they are poor at poker or setting a trap with kk+ (this is pretty debatable, in fact i don't like it). So this is more likely this happen at small stakes sngs.

Back to the actual situation, we are going to have to put it in the next 2 hands. We are likely to end up with similar pot odds for our stack in both spots and with a similar number of villians in the hand for us to beat to survive. So it is just a case of picking the best hand to run with imo. We can adjust our ranges based on what the bb is like, if he likes giving us a walk, we can tighten our pushing range utg, hoping to get walked next hand. Or if he doesn't understand pot odds we can shove wider hoping to get our shove through.

I disagree with the Dean.

If the blinds are both solid high stakes players then no way will the small blind flat call the 900 pre-flop. That opens up a door for the big blind to make a profitable shove really wide and get 2:1 on his money against whatever the short stack is making his UTG stand with.

Maybe this happens often when the blinds are not so solid, but the best players couldn't care too much about implicit collusion to maximize the chances of eliminating short stack, and are more concerned with making isolating re-raises to maximize their own chance of winning a decent pot.

Post flop (if for some reason they get there) they'll be checking it down, but pre-flop they'll be either folding, or over-shoving like it's going out of fashion.

I would like to commend The Dean's game selection though.

If he thinks it's a good play to flat call the shorties shove pretty wide at this stage, then he obviously doesn't play the big limit games on Stars/Tilt.

Regulars acting after him would be re-raising as wide as 25% and the Dean would quickly become less of a fan of flat calling the shorty for 1/4 of your stack when he sees the trash that has pushed him out of the pot.

He's been playing too many "Double Your Money" stts :)

Thats exactly how I read it, it was almost as if it was a sattelite with 4 spaces up for grabs...

o.k before posting this i have to concede that i haven't read the article, thus the following maybe fatuous and a tad presumptuous but haven't sng strategy been done to death?

I'm not just talking about pushbot ICM poker either, i know stts have moved on a little bit since that but isn't everyone up to speed really on where we're at with beating these games?

there are always going to be contentious individual hands but an article on like this a little superfluous no?

I still don't think he has worked out when the bubble happens then, as people don't collude till we are actually on the bubble in DON's.


If you read the article then "The Dean" seems to have avoided all the decent sng strategy articles, given he thinks colluding to get rid of short stack 5 handed in big buyin sngs is standard play.

You may have a point about sng strategy being done to death but 99.9% of the poker population still play them far from optimally.

Nah, keep em coming.

away you go then son........................ ::)

Snoopy i am curious why you keep asking this guy to write articles for you when everyone so far has been utter tosh!

Why didn't you just ask Longy/Tank to write about this subject?

potw

I don't ask, he emails them through, my only ask was that his next article would be on SNGs as I understood these to be his specialty. Tank did write for us, for a fee per article, but decided to call it a day. If Longy would like to supply his words of wisdom in article form, then I'd be more than happy to upload the content, but sadly would be unable to offer any monetary reward.

Almost the exact same article was on THM site about 3 weeks ago. I think he used to do some useful stuff, but he ran out of material a long time ago.

More than happy to follow the Wardonkey SnG system, it has served me well.

Thanks Robert, but those articles are more than a little dated by now!

I don't see myself writing any articles to be honest, I am very much aware of my limitations especially when it comes to writing. I have made the odd post in forum on the learning centre, which i was happy to do. I would rather keep it like that, it has nothing to do with the money whether i was to write articles or not for blonde.

Do a new one please, I keep bubbling atm!

So do I.....

 :D