Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Strategy for big overlay tournament

My local poker room is holding a series of tournaments at the end of this month. The immediately preceeding Saturday, a pseudo freeroll will be held for top 100 "points leaders" from the daily tournaments that have been run at the poker room for the last 6 months. I call it a pseudo freeroll because there is a $15 entry fee, and there are $40 rebuys and a $40 add on. "Points" are awarded for players that finish in the money in any of the daily tournaments at a rate of 1 point for every $10 won.

I know that some players play in a ton of these tournaments, so there are some sizeable points leaders. Still, I've somehow managed to climb up to 20th from playing in the bigger Saturday tournaments for the last 2 months. The rankings within the top 100 determine how many starting chips you are given. However, with rebuys allowed, this seems fairly irrelevant to me.
I had initially been under the impression that 4 $3200 prize packages would be awarded from this tournament, so I wasn't that excited about it. I had even been considering going out of town that weekend for a poker trip. However, it turns out that, conservatively, the tournament director had just listed the 4 $3200 packages as the guaranteed minimum payout.

It turns out that the prize pool for this "freeroll" is already over $90k, and the final prize pool will like be approximately $100k. (Apparently $5 is taken from every player's entry fee to every tournament to build this freeroll prize pool). The prize structure will likely pay out the top ten places with 1st getting roughly 27% and I guess 10th would be somewhere around 3%.

I will obviously give this tournament my full attention!

I believe that starting chips will range between $500T and $3000T depending on the player's ranking. Rebuys will be $1000T (I believe a rebuy can be done any time a player has $1kT chips or less), and the add on is $2000T.

What is the best strategy for this structure?

$40 $1000T rebuys for a ~$100k prize pool certainly means there will be extreme all-in aggression during the 1 hour rebuy period to amass a large chip stack. I guess there can't be much "strategy" during this time, but there should be a willingness to automatically take any and all coin flip opportunities to double up in the rebuy period. I will budget perhaps $400 for rebuys.

The extreme aggression will likely, but not necessarily, die down after the first hour. How are most people going to be playing during the middle stages of this tournament?

The tournament is on Oct 15, so I still have about a week and a half to think about how to play it.

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