dealing with megastacks to your left

[rico4]

In the last cuople of tournies I have played, I have gotten a healthy stack of around 2-3x average. Then when the bubble aproaches I get moved to another table, and get placed with the hyper-lag cl of the tourny to my immediate left. As I built my stack stealing and playing semi-lag, this really cripples my play, as he plays and raises every pot. My natural response is to tighten up. When I do get involved, he repops it with anything, and I get up playing huge pots with marginal hands. Thats not what I aim to do. How do you handle these situations? This is in the low limits btw

[DragonZ]

in my last 4.40 i ran into one of these. and he was at my table most the tourney. he called any preflop raise except a push, which is called with crap like K7 and sucked out. i kept getting blinded off due to him...he had 75k when only one other player in the tourney had more then 20k it was lame for me...

[rico4]

it's like you can either play back at him, and maybe double, or get blinded out... I haven't played a lot of MTT's, so I'm not really clear on how to beat these guys

[Thinkards]

The original post does not say whether this is happening live or on-line -- it makes a huge difference.

If this is on-line, I would be more inclined to choose your best hands/best positioning, and push hard (if necessary, all-in) pre-flop. Simply do not fool around or get cute.

If the tourney is live, then play your standard TAG game, but with a twist.... you will need to open-raise with the intention of making very stiff pre-flop re-raises of his raises. Of course, if someone else re-raises first, and your hand cannot stand the pressure, then let it go pre-flop. However, because your hand selection is going to be way ahead of his most of the time, you should try to push whatever edge that gives you.


TK

[rico4]

sorry about that, it's online. thnx for the pointers

[Soulman]

OP,

I think Thinkard's line is pretty bad - playing "hard" with good hands leads you to lose value against this player type. Play aggressively, sure, but don't overbet so hard he won't call/reraise. The exact line will of course vary according to villain's exact betting/calling pattern.

Basically, you'll have to be more willing to take some chances against this kind of player if you're not willing to be run over - widen the range you will raise/call a reraise/etc with. If he actually has a hand when you call his reraise/3-bet him and get called or whatever, well [censored] happens. If you win, you'll be huge and have a good shot at going very deep.