So the preperation continues. Mini-UBOC 6 starts in 10 days and now is the critical time to get ready. Last night was the first night back at the tables after taking Tuesday off and the focus was a set of $6.50 90man Turbo KO's, a regular $10 turbo on AP and a Sniper 10k Sat Double Stack Ultra Turbo. The Ultra Turbo was the real focus of the evening in preperation for Event #3 which is a Deep Stack Ultra Turbo (5k starting chips with 3min blind levels). I am pleased to say that I won the seat which translated very nicely into $55 TD's which is a free buyin to something in the Mini so nothing to scoff at, but more importantly I think I learned some very crucial lessons about Ultra Turbos. When you play a regular turbo standard thought is to play very tight until the stacks get shallow in order to maximize your fold/fear equity when the push/fold begins and to avoid losing anything significant early and eliminating that leverage for when you need it. Conventional wisdom says push/fold starts at 20bb's or so and you need to start becoming active around that area, shove wide/call tight unless you need to make specific adjustments around your exact table and circumstance. What I noticed in the Ultra Turbo is this philosophy puts you into a strange push/pull phenomena. What do I mean by that, well what I observed is that you get caught up in sort of a weird seesaw effect due to the fact that the blinds rise so much so fast. Effectively your stack keeps reverting to a shallow point each blind level which is effectively only a single orbit of the table. What does that mean for us, well you have two choices
1. Tread water while the waves hit you
2. Get out in front of the wave and surf.
Here's what I think proper Starting Deep Stacked Ultra Turbo play may look like. Avoid (1). This is going to put you into continual situations where you are going to race and gamble for your tournament. This isn't good and is going to put your result sqaurely into the hands of Lady Luck and your powers of run good. I don't trust them, never have, never will. Aim for #2. What does that mean. You need to adjust when you start to get involved and when you start to shift gears. What I experiemented with and what seemed to work very nicely is that I started to shift into push/fold earlier with a larger effective stack size (30-40bb's). The immediate argument is that is way to big of a stack to be shoving. BINGO! What you are trying to do here is to get in front of the wave. In 3 minutes your stack becomes standard for push/fold and everyone is starting to look for spots. In 6 minutes it becomes desperate. In 9 minutes your screwed. What you are trying to do is leverage the fact that your stack is big and that people are going to be very very very hesitant to do anything against you. The entire focus is to attempt keep picking up as much as possible so that when the remainder of the table moves into desperation mode you have enough chips to buffer you against the lost races and that won races will continue to improve your situation. The other effective element is that if your stack is larger than the current situation at your table you have the ability to apply substantial and continual pressure because you can afford the losses, where the remainder of the table cannot. Fear Equity is everything in this tournament or so my thoughts indicate. I am going to try a couple more of these over the weekend utilizing this strategy, more to come on it. This is the Gman signing out. May all your flushes be Royal!