I love going for the triple-up in online poker tournaments. Especially if I haven’t been able to do anything early and have slipped to a below average stack. In fact I hate having a slightly under average stack! That is the worst scenario for me. I can deal with just about every other situation, but when I am beginning to get a little short-stacked in the early-to-middle stage of a tournament I am going to do something about it, and soon.

My favorite thing to do is find a spot where I can get 3-ways all-in before the flop with a middle pair or middle suited connectors; heck even 1-gapper suited connectors will do. You’d be surprised how often the other two players have each other dominated, leaving your cards live. Or, one player will have AK and the other a small pocket pair still leaving you in decent shape.

In order to get into this situation you need to see that it’s obvious two people are going all-in and all you have to do is join them. Here is an example from yesterday’s noon $20k guarantee at Poker Stars. There was a large raise early, a late shove, and just me left to act before the original raiser with:

So I push as well and of course the original bettor calls. My two opponents turn over:

and

Pretty good, no? They are gonna have a tough time hitting an ace. Flop comes:

Turn:

River:

And that’s the way I bust out of every tournament - by an opponent drawing thin on the river. OK collectively they had 8 outs, but what’s wrong with the other 34 cards in the deck? Why do they never hit?

When the triple up works I am in good shape and can start playing poker again. When it doesn’t, well, I got work to do anyway.

Technorati Tags: Poker, Poker stars, Poker tournament

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 6:08 pm and is filed under tourney results. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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