[Vee Quiva]

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Deep stack poker

Tournament structure has generally become far slower over the last year and change, while dead money still busts out at a relatively rapid clip. In general, the bigger the buyin, the better the structure, so big event sats tend to be very deep; on Stars, the mean number of chips 3-4 hours into this sat was over 50 BB, and as one of the chip leaders, I had over 100. This doesn't have much to do with anything except that you now have to know how to play with cash game stacks in order to beat sats; it's no longer optional. Furthermore, later on (before the true bubble but after bubble FE becomes a factor) it's pretty important to learn to resteal and bluff properly


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Last night's $650 in Stars was the first one I have qualified for. I think there were 24 seats up for grabs.

Maybe it was just bad luck, but I was amazed how well everyone played at my table for the first 4 levels (until I busted out) I had Game Time running and no one had a VPIP over 22%. Some were as low as 13%. Since I was not getting any cards to play, I tried to survive on blind steals and resteals.

After I had indentified whose blinds I wanted to pick on, I was consistently beat to the punch by other players who had figured out the same thing. After folding my crappy hands in the big blind for an hour, one player was obviously picking on my blind. As I got ready to make the big resteal with any 2 cards, the button would reraise him out of the pot. Since I didn't have a good enough read to push all in and resteal his resteal, I had to fold. This happened 2 orbits in a row.

Hopefully the next time I qualify for the $650 I will sit at a better table and be dealt better cards.

I just wanted to let everyone know, that the early rounds of this tournament will take a lot more skill than the donkfest qualifiers to get into them.