[pzhon]

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What

good lord man, get your chips in there already

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When (if ever .. always ??),would you normally play

Q[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] 6[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] ..... J[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] 2[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]

I hadn't been playing those two combinations at all.....maybe that's why I was so behind?

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No, those hands are terrible. However, unless you were about to be in the money, you should still have played them, because you had just posted about half of your stack each time in the blinds and antes. That means you get a huge discount to play, and there is a lot of dead money. Having a 1/5 chance to increase your stack by a factor of 8 is a great deal.

You may be overemphasizing surviving deep into the tournament with a tiny stack over accumulating chips. Noted poker player Amir Vahedi said, "In order to live, you must be willing to die." You need to be willing to risk busting out to accumulate chips.

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I guess what I am asking is there a different set of starting hands for FreeRolls / tournaments than ring games?

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Yes, but that's not really the issue here.

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And do/should the starting hands change as the blinds increase ?


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Yes, they change. With deep stacks (75BB+), you usually want to play to have an informatioon advantage in big pots, so you favor hands like 76s which occasionally make monster hands over hands like ATo which often made good but not great hands. As stacks get shorter, you should aim for hands that make a good pair often, while speculative hands lose value. The reward of stealing the blinds relative to the risk of losing your stack changes as your stack gets even smaller, so you should aggressively attack the blinds when your stack is under 10 BB. You often won't get called, and your hand only needs to be ok against the types of hands that will call you, not against all hands. When your stack gets even smaller, limpers or even the big blind will be pot-committed against a raise, so you should push for value.

At no stack size do J2s and Q6o become good hands, but you are getting such a discount due to the blinds and antes that you should have played them.