Fite Reviews a $12 180man

Hey fizz, good video. Okay, so I was explaining to my friend some of the sng strategy I learned, and there was one thing I told him that I may have gotten wrong.

Basically, my logic was this: If you had aces every hand, and pushed all in every hand and never got called, you would guaranteed win the tournament by stealing the blinds, however if you got called every hand (assuming other players had as many chips as you) you would have a 20% chance to lose the tournament every time you got called. Now with this reasoning, I was making the point to him (and to myself) that you don't want to see showdowns.

Now your strategy of raise calling it off is completely the opposite of what I was telling my friend more or less, because it definitely will end up having more show downs. The thing is, if you raise bvb and take down the blinds say 85% of the time, and then minraise call-it off with A/9 70% of the time I guess you just have to figure out if the extra chips gained in the 60/40 is worth the risk vs the chips gained bvb. Personally, I think it depends on the stage in the tournament, and is almost never more profitable in 9-18 mans because you really just need to survive and chip up. In early-mid stages of a 180 I could 100% see use for it, because you need a lot of chips to make the money. Anyways hit me back with your thoughts on this.

The only reason I can think why my logic was wrong is because you want to be gaining chips faster in the mid-stages of these sngs. In all honesty, most of my general game-plan that I came up with for 180s is just me theory crafting, and a lot of it may be wrong. I see a lot of players doing different things, and as far as what is optimal is really up for debate I think.

On that note, pokerstars just came out with a shit ton of new sngs and I just logged on and saw them, so i gota go cream my pants and do about 300 $5 hypers right now. Waiting 2 weeks for another video is gonna be painful, but hopefully these will keep me busy. Play well in the events!

jimbo: Your logic is wrong because you don't mind seeing showdowns when you have a huge equity edge. You still get to steal the blinds anyway but you just get more hands to get it in vs you for an increased overall EV. Basically by raise/not jamming some 'weak' hands  + hands you can raise/call you give yourself more options to gain chips than just to jam every hand. The bubble effect doesn't matter all that much to the point where you should be avoiding action with hands as strong as AA. (that's probably only reserved for certain sat structures)

Also, do you have any thoughts on the stars changes to the sngs bfizz?

      Thanks for the response to the questions guys, I have been doing some 180s lately and yeah, I can definitely find some really good spots for min-raising instead of getting lazy and just going all-in. Sometimes when you are doing a lot of tables it is a bit tough to figure out if it is good or not, because some of the times I find I need to be calling off people that really hurt my chip equity, so I will do a min-raise when I shouldn't have. That and there are some really marginally +ev spots that I probably miss, but I am really not to concerned with those. Over all, however, it does feel a lot safer and a lot more +ev to be min-raising in certain spots then just shoving. I was the guy that saw A/K utg and said fuck it and shoved 20bbs, but I am getting in a lot more 70/30's for a lot of chips now that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

     I did about 600 of the hyper turbos this week, they are the nuts. I only played them for 3 less than 4 hour sessions and still got in a lot. They are about a 13.5 average duration, less then 5% rake, and filled to the brim with fish open shoving A/3 first hand utg. I would say average roi for these bad boys will be about 8-10% because of the low rake, and I think I am pretty close to that. In a day you can get easily get in 300+ of these, so at a 10% roi that is $150/day not including rake back. It is close, the 180 mans you basically double the roi and double the buy in, but only 1/3rd of the tournaments on average, so its tough to say what is really better. I think these have less variance because you can get in such more volume so you don't have as many swings in the long run.

     Another thing that is also really nice is they play a lot more like cash game where you don't need to set aside an entire block of time to play them, you can load up 10-20 of them within minutes, and stop playing in less than an hour if something comes up. I was playing them wrong as well when I first started, I was iso shoving a lot lighter than I should have been with the chip lead, but I fixed that now. I was basically thinking A-high was the nuts against the short stacks, but the problem is you give up so much tournament equity calling them. I did some pokerstove work and even a hand as strong as A/9o is actually a slight dog to a 25% pushing range, and only really gets as high as 60/40 against a pretty wide range. The nice comfortable spot you are in just isnt worth the risk of lossing half your stack. I am probably never folding an ace bvb, and iso raising with any deacent ace, because you are getting good odds to with antes+blinds, but I found out that I am not as far ahead vs ranges as I thought I was (I thought A/9s was the nuts vs a short stack). If anyone else is doing the hypers hit me up with a PM for discussing some killer strategies, like limping Aces first hand! haha.