Rebuy tourney strategy

[NMcNasty]

"The best practice is to rebuy before the tournament starts and to be willing to make several rebuys. At first, play a bit looser than normal and be willing to get all the chips in pre-flop with medium strength cards such as pairs 55 or better, A9 or better aces, any suited ace, suited connectors higher than 65s and suited one gapers above 97s."

WHAT. I just don't get it. Get all your chips in preflop with 9 high? Are you kidding me. I understand the concept that you should try and double early so you can play other donkeys who are even more desperate to double up early for 300 BB deep instead of 150, but seriously does that warrant getting all your 150 bbs in preflop as a 2-1 dog?

Sometimes I think playing super-tight is the way to go. Why even play AQ from early position if your opponents are just going to push allin with every pair, AK, and AQs+?

I could be wrong, but I feel a lot of players are seriously misguided by rebuy philosophy. I can understand how just a few maniacs at the table creates a chain reaction causing everyone else to play looser. If one idiot is raising allin 40% of his hands, it might be correct to call with 20% depending on position. But allin with 9 high? It seems like your giving all these donkeys more reason to push A8s in the first place.

[karlj]

This is my first post and although I have been playing poker for years I am no where near as up on my game as most of you. So go a bit easy on me.

Your both right and both a bit off. On paper in rebuys if you checked my played hands and the strength I hit them with it would read out as a loose/aggresive style. Yet in reality I am actually playing a tight/semi-passive style. I used to hate rebuys, but where I live they offer very cheap rebuy tournaments every week. I used to walk in with every intention of playing like a shark, but the amount of all in bets soon had me playing like a rock. A rock will never win in a "rebuy period" purely because the other loose maniacs are actually good players and they will switch gears whenever you enter a pot. What you find is only the better hands than yours will play you. The rock is hard to beat so lets fold and give him some more bad cards and steal his blinds back. If the rock is lucky someone maybe willing to get in to a coin flip with him, but generally they will leave any bets of any size away from him.

The rebuy section is more like a limit game to be honest, drawing hands can be calculated to some extent as more chips are just a rebuy away. Where your seated plays a bigger part here purely because of the game being so aggresive, you really do need as much information as possible about what you might be facing. If your going to call a reraise with 96s then make sure that the raisers have been playing worse cards than this, if it means your all in then you have to either start getting more cash out ready or fold the things. It looks maniac play, but in reality I do a lot of work keeping track of who is playing what.

The most important people to keep track of is the two people to your left and the raisers. If they happen to be the same people then your job is actually easier, you do not have to worry about if he is going to go all in or not, you can take it as green that he probably is, what your interested in is what he is likely to do that with and try to have just slightly better standards than him/her. The table naturally becomes sort of two games in one. One game is when the rocks play, when they play you need to out rock them. The other is when the rocks do not play. When this happens (most of the time) the game is actually short handed, it is played with the same sort of starting hand standards as a short handed game. Every shorthanded game plays different as different people play different sorts of hands, it is exactly the same with the rebuy period, you can never make a starting hand chart because to be perfectly honest you will probably never play the same style twice in a row.

My problem is what happens after the rebuys, I tend to fall flat on my face and I have come to the conclusion that information on what sort of cards other players are likely to play actually drops in worth the tighter a player plays. Flop fabric starts to play a bigger roll and I am getting better but I do need to read a lot more stuff on tourneys as I am actually very good at the "rebuy period" (I usually have about 7x my initial stack after 1 hr) and it seems a shame to keep wasting my post rebuy advantage.

[ChipFerFree]

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This is my first post and although I have been playing poker for years I am no where near as up on my game as most of you. So go a bit easy on me.

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Nice post -- welcome!

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A rock will never win in a "rebuy period" purely because the other loose maniacs are actually good players and they will switch gears whenever you enter a pot.

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I don't totally agree with this. If a table is REALLY crazy -- I'll play like a ROCK knowing -- like you said about the two to my left -- someone is calling no matter what I do. In these cases I wait for the bomb and drop it.

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The table naturally becomes sort of two games in one. One game is when the rocks play, when they play you need to out rock them. The other is when the rocks do not play.

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Mostly this is right on though -- again excellent post and welcome!