Furry Feline Flops

There's clearly more than one way to skin a cat, or in the case of poker, accumulate chips in a tournament.

I played in a 45-person SnG today. Seventy-five hands into the tourney, we were down to 10 players and hit the first break. Amazingly, I had the second largest chip stack (T9900) at this point. Why so amazingly? Simple: I couldn't hit two cards above J9 to save my life, but I got lucky a couple of times on the BB when I flopped the nuts (wheel straight one time, and a 7-high straight another) and got action on my raises. Same thing with a couple of small pair of mine that held up on scary boards. The rest of my chips I got by stealing every second lap or so just to stay alive. My VPIP, as we went into the first break, was a miniscule 7.5% and my preflop raise percentage was 6.5%. Can you say Tight-Aggressive?

The chip leader(T13,300), on the other hand, going into the break had a VPIP of over 40% and a preflop raise percentage of 0%. Can you say Loose-Passive? This guy NEVER raised preflop; he simply called a lot and saw the flop as frequently as possible. He limped with aces, jacks, and tens that I saw, plus a bunch of other marginal stuff, like 97s and JTo. It didn't seem to matter what his cards were; he evidently knew he could get off the hand post-flop if it didn't hit him hard enough. Definitely not a devotee of the Annette School of Poker, but, hell, it seemed to work for him.

Both that guy and I made it to the final three, with him busting out in third place. I went on to take second, which should make me feel good, but I made one bad call on the end that cost me first place. I shouldn't complain, I know, but I'd rather lose knowing I didn't do anything wrong (i.e., lose to a suckout) than fail due to some temporary brain fart of my own making. Oh, well... I'll do better next time I' sure... ;-)

In any case, I found it interesting that two such vastly different playing styles could do equally well in the same tournament, against the same opp. Just goes to show you it's more about playing your strengths and exploiting the other players' weaknesses, than it is about your own cards. Meow.

All-in for now...
-Bug