I like it 
I don’t think I’ve ever had the guts to try a triple barrel bluff and would probably be embarrassed if I did try.
In fact I hardly ever bluff unless I’m in a fight or die situation as I described above.
I know it’s part of the game and the top players use it all the time to win but I ain’t no good at it.
I’m okay with the bluff/trap thing but not bluffing with dookey hands.
Speaking for lower levels only:
So generally what happens, especially on the 2.5K Ruby MTTs like Kick Starter:
So yes, most MTTs do tend to play in Turbo-mode with the fast blind schedules. I don’t mind, but can see how others might. Anyway, MTT final table play ends up being people who got lucky with shove/fold or maniacs who bully with big stacks (as they should). It leaves very little room for “normal” poker strategies.
I will quickly add that the best MTT poker at low stakes is typically played at the 5K regionals. I enjoy those thoroughly.
So is there some other fixes for the increases of blinds time? Maybe 1k to 5k more starting chips? Or starting with lower blinds?
I do see what you guys are saying, But I enjoy that knuckle down part!! 75% of the time when I hit the final table I will be the lowest stacked, and I have to really mix it up to stay alive, including quick thinking, timely bluffs, and as a last resort I will bingo. But my favorite feeling is going in short, using my wits, and sometimes I’m rewarded with a 3rd, 2nd, or 1st place win. And it is very satisfying to make good decisions in a rush, Maybe I’ll do better with a little more time to work.
P.S. I was typing this while playing both Americans, so if you look at the fist American, you will see what I mean, still in right now at final table!
About a week ago, @1Warlock mentioned push/fold strategies.
I went looking and found @ pokerlistings dot com, the following excerp.
What is Push-Fold Strategy?
By cutting down your options to just two simple moves you’ll give yourself the best chance of getting back on your feet and making a deep run in the tournament.
By moving all-in and folding at the right times you will:
1- Use your stack effectively to pick up blinds and antes
2- Avoid losing valuable chips by limping or raising only to fold later in the hand
Make your double-ups count
By doing that same search, I found articles that contend… at thier core, many of the top players’s strategies are build around this basic premise of Push/Fold strategy.
There are many credible acticles on this strategy…
I agree dumb ppl, doing dumb stuff, for no “apparent” reason whatsoever…while annoying… usually doesn’t last long. But the flip side of that are smart ppl that do dumb stuff for a reason… When 1 person looks at another person’s play, and determine’s it dumb, for the simple reason they either don’t like it or they don’t understand it, in the long run they only hurt themselves.
Take the person , 1/2 way thru a MTT loses a huge pot to a bad beat, and subsequently goes on super-tilt… and fritters thier chips away in the next few hands and is gone. We all look @ that as say… yeah I can understand that, sux we have to deal with 5 hands of his all ins before he loses the rest but het thats poker.
Take the person, who @ Heads-Up… only plays this strategy. I certainly do not consider that a problem… as I usually use it Heads-up… alot will say , sure thats ok.
or Take the person that notices passive play and just turns super agressive, knowing other ppl won’t call an all-in cause they don’t wanna bust before the bubble, or they just wanna make the final table so they’ll sit out and wait that person out… all the while losing blind after blind after blind, in the process… still ok, right ?
Then you say, but thats not what we mean…
ok Take the person who gets a wild hair up thier butt and for sheets and giggles, wants to see how far they can go … AI every hand. The have a reason for what they are doing… if thats ok cause there is reason behind it… then that too is ok
And finally…
Take the person who understand advanced leaderboard strategies, and tailors thier play to the conditions and metrics of the promotion… in that case… Dont hate the playa, hate the game !!! Don’t attack the player, attack the metrics… seems smart.
What I’m trying to get across, is in NoLimit Tournament poker… putting your tournament life, on the line, to call an All-in, than has you covered, will always be uncomfortable. Learning to push thru that anxiety, is 1 necessary step in any players’s evolution in poker. Using that same “pressure” in a offensive way is an effective tool. I have heard comments like… ohh that player only has 2 moves… shove & fold…
( what about … ohh that player is only “using” 2 moves … shove & fold… )
By limiting your opponents read on your play, and using pressure, push/fold can be very usefull and effective… risky, hell yes … There are ALWAYS aspects of other people’s game, that any 1 person in a vaccuum will hate, me included… but that doesn’t mean you can just discount that person’s play as harmfull or wrong… or moronic or dumb.
Not only do I think we should ban the use of the word “Bingo” period.
ANY Raise , preflop , for ANY Reason , whether its 2x the BB or All-In,
can be and should be considered a “Bingo”. AA loses just like 23 does…
Which is why a Bingo is nothing more than an ultimate aggresive raise …
Maybee its high time Dr.Sun’s PokerLab, @SunPowerGuru , should investigate the Joys, Sorrows, and genius… that such a simple strategy, is so effective…
Sassy
I just tried this theory for 1 whole SnG
6max, 3 table - Santa’s SnG …
I didn’t go all in every hand, but every hand I played I went all in…
( huge difference there )
Got 4th, with 6 KOs … yes I miss’d cashing by 1 spot, but that was
a very successfull SnG … and may I be clear… NOT BINGO
Sassy
True, but I have barely ever seen anyone going all-in on every hand in a tournament, but some people go all-in much more than others, so it is all a matter of degree.
Here is the last hand I played online, last night, in which I was doing very well in a tournament until I made a big raise preflop with TT, (I hoped to take down the blinds unopposed, if I was called by AK, I was prepared to take a shot, and if I was called by an overpair, well that is just bad luck) an opponent reraised me all in, and after some thought and recall of his prior play, I called and was pleased to see that he had 33, but not so pleased when he hit one of his two outs and I was eliminated. Had I won the hand I would have been very well placed to win the tournament or finish high in the money.
What was my opponent doing? Was it a bluff, expecting me to fold after already committing a large part of my stack, or was his wife calling him (or her) to take the dog out right now? Who knows?
https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/452478496
Obviously if I had not raised so high preflop, possibly I would have pulled back, so perhaps I was guilty of playing a bit of bingo myself.
In a hand in an earlier tournament I limped in with a pair of tens, the flop against two or three oppos came with undercards, so put in a meaty bet of over half the pot, only to be raised double the value of the pot by another hand. I folded, and the opponent turned over a pair of tens, the same hand as mine. However I took my beating, licked my wounds, and came back to finish high in the money, and eliminated my tormentor later on in the tourney, having noticed his tendency to overbet the flop with non-nut hands.
In the early stages of a tournament, those players you see who have tripled their chips within a few hands of the start are nearly always bingoists, and so are those who are eliminated within the first round of the blinds, but having established a position, they invariably settle down.
In tournament play a certain amount of judicious and successful bingo play at some stage of the tournament is almost a de facto requirement if you are to acquire a megastack and get into a winning position.
Going all-in on every hand is a maladaptive strategy that has been shown to be ineffective in the long run. No-one has ever used this strategy to win the main event in the WSOP, or even got close, which would be the case if it had a substantial chance of winning.
Clearly if someone starts going all-in on every hand at the start of a tournament, if their opponents only call with top 10% hands when the blinds are low, they will soon be cut down.
My remarks are only relevant to tournament play, which I see more as a contest for stack dominance, and will not apply to cash games, etc.
Totally!
Absolutely!!!
Luckily yes. But unfortunately it’s not always the case, and many times these bingo players would take down quite a few victims with them before they are busted out. But either way they don’t last long most of the time.
If I was a bingo player, I would have probably done research and wrote a thesis about how great this “strategy” is and mentioned only the best places where it works if applied, and neglected to mention all the bad places where it ruins the game. So it’s perfectly understandable to take one side and defend it so passionately when it’s the core of how one plays. However, I’m not a bingo player, and do not and will not encourage such style no matter how useful it is in some situations.
Now I can write my own thesis and list all the horrible times where this kind of play is baseless, meaningless, and done in the spirit of poor gamesmanship, but I really don’t have the time for all this, and to be honest, don’t feel like beating this dead horse anymore. So to each their own. Some of us encourage this “strategy” and some of us don’t even call it that. None of us needs to convince the other of anything. 
In the wise words of a wise person:
I’m joining Group C.
I truly wonder how it is possible that people can discuss such a topic for hours and hours, days and days, especially because only one type of “bingo” players was meant, and NOBODY else: the players who go all-in pre-flop every hand from the beginning of a tourney, make some victims in the process, then, soon or later, are eliminated. I’ve seen hundreds of such situations.
Of course they are bothering, but in my case, if I’m unlucky enough to meet them at my table, I call if I have decent cards, and if I am one of the victims, I always think: after all, tomorrow there will be another tourney. Often, I don’t even have to wait a day, only a couple of minutes
Replay should engage a psychoanalyst and analyse posts, not hands. LOL We would learn a lot about the characteristics of human nature, or in our specific case, about those of poker players.
I’m trying to become a psychoanalyst but I’m only half-way there.
As soon as you graduate, do volunteer here as «Player Therapist». It would be a great support for all of us, but also an excellent practice for your future career.
Personally, though, I would not recommend you to specialise in gaming addiction.
One of my best German friends, a psychologist specialised in gaming addiction, had to give up his job, because most of his patients had no money left to pay him.
I’d say as a general rule of thumb, you’d want to keep the ratio of average-stack-to-big-blind fairly consistent throughout the tournament. To do that, figure out the rate at which you expect people to be knocked out at each level. For example, if you typically have 200 players in a particular MTT, you want it to run a total of ~2 hours, and levels are 10 minutes long, then on average you want about 30% of the field to bust at each level, so the blind increase from level-to-level should be on the order of 30%. If, on the other hand, there are usually only 50 players in the MTT, levels last 8 minutes, and you’re still shooting for a 2-hour run time, you’ll want to back down blind increases to about 16%.
Let’s look at one of the more popular mid-stakes tourneys, the European Sunset, as an example. Starting stacks are 3K, and blinds start at 10-20, meaning everyone starts fairly deep with 150BB. Blind levels are 10 minutes long. If 20% of the field busts within the first ten minutes - pretty aggressive considering the late registration period will still be open - then when the blinds jump to 15-30, average stack size will be 3750 chips, or 125BB.
The biggest blind jumps in this MTT seem to happen between levels 3 and 7, with a 50% increase from 20-40 to 30-60, a 67% increase from there to 50-100, a 100% increase (!) from there to 100-200, and another 50% increase from there to 150-300. In the space of 40 minutes, the blinds increase an aggregate amount of 7.5x, which would require 87% of the players to be knocked out in that span in order to keep the average stack the same with respect to the big blind. That seems… aggressive. To smooth things out, you could add a level of 40-80 between the 30-60 and 50-100 levels, a level of 75-150 between 50-100 and 100-200, and maybe a 120-240 level between 100-200 and 150-300.
Thoughts?
Nice breakdown (add antes as well though to get full picture) - format is one of my considerations whenever looking at a tournament, here or elsewhere. IMO, aside from a few of the 15K Regional MTT’s, most of the games here are intended to be short formats/turbos. Some people like this and some don’t. I’m not a fan myself.
The idea of having deeper stacks at the final table has been an issue in cash tournaments for a long time. Many players complained over the years that it was a shame to have such short stacks left to play at the end. These players had worked so hard to get there for days only to have to go into push/fold mode when the most money was on the line. The people playing the best poker wanted the tournaments to be decided on the strength of their play more than on all-in flips.
The pressure from top players has forced tournament directors to reformat some games in order to attract the best fields. They have slowed down the escalation in blinds/antes later in the games so that players at the final table would still have plenty of room to play nearly their full range of hands. The response has been universally positive from the top players. The Poker Masters event was one recent example of where this new format was introduced.
I would love to see more variety in the formats offered here and would definitely be supportive of creating structures with deeper available stacks at final tables. Short-format games have their place and can be very convenient and entertaining. However, longer formats with better structures for final tables would be great to have as well. IMO, if the site built some of these into their schedule, it would attract the better players and would be successful. Anything that reduces variance and puts more emphasis on skill should attract stronger fields overall.
ADDED: Of course everything gets distorted by the amount of limping in these games. With open raises and 3-bets preflop, the stack depths at the final tables should be higher. Of course it would also reduce the overall length of the tournaments. I need to give some thought about how to weigh these two competing factors. We could just ban limping and solve a whole lot of problems
I’m sorry to say that I’ve lost the plot here. Can you be so kind as to tell me what your analysis has to do with “Bingo Players Should Not Be Banned”, which is actually the title of the thread?
Obviously, if it is simply a private conversation, to which I have nothing to object, I apologise for the interruption.
The context is that final tables at Replay MTTs are typically very short-stacked. When all of the players are sitting on 20BB or less, all-in or fold is actually the optimal play. I was proposing blind structure changes to avoid that outcome.
It’s definitely a loose connection to the main thread, and I can totally understand if a mod wants to split this into a separate topic.
I don’t disagree with anything you say, but my favorite tournament at this time on this site is The Hijack, which starts at 7:30 pm Eastern Time, US, with each stack having 5000 chips and the blinds at 30/60. Usually there are about 70 entrants.
There is a break after one hour, at which point about half the players, or a little less are left, and after this point the blinds start to escalate and the going gets very tough, However it still takes another hour or more to finish, and if you make the final table, you will see another 5-minute break at 9:30 p.m.
So for most home players, this is probably as much time as they want to devote to one tournament, and if it went on for another hour, it would get to be very grueling.
I keep the tournament lobby window open (I guess everyone does this, or not?) and play as much on stack sizes as by cards. the philosophy being as follows:
Starting with 5000 chips it is essential to keep one’s stack over 5000 chips or face increasing powerlessness and lack of bluffing power. In addition, if your stack is over 5000 chips, if you do get the chance to double up, then you should find yourself in a good place in the tournament, However if your stack has slipped below 2500 chips, you may double up, but still end up with a barely competitive stack.
By the time you reach the third set of blinds, which is 75/150 with antes (I think), you definitely need to keep your stack above 10 Big Blinds and to start shoving at any decent opportunity based on cards and/or postion until you bust out, or are out of the danger zone. If you keep waiting and waiting for AA, you may just become a small stack with no ability to threaten anyone and be swatted like a fly by a megastack. (Or maybe you will suddenly hit the big time, win a string of pots, and emerge as a leader–it happens, but how often I don’t know.)
Watch your position relative to everyone else, including players on other tables all the time, and be prepared to make adjustments. For example in a six player per table tournament with 11-players left, there will be a table of six players and a table of 5. Do you know where the smallest stack is, and when they are next in the Big Blind. You may want to slightly increase your shoving range when the table size switches from 6 to 5. If there are 7 players left, the tables will be 4 and 3, and if you make the final table, you will need to tighten up a bit to adjust for 6 players. WIth 3-players on your table you need to win the blinds an average of every 3 hands to stay where you are, but if you have a megastack, you may want to play a little tighter and let the smaller stacks knock each other out. As a megastack, you do not want to get all-in against one of the bigger stacks unless you have the nuts, but if you are against microstacks, you can take a shot at flush draws and gutshot straights, or try to improve on the turn when you flop second or third pair. Often a small stack will fold to an all-in raise on the flop with the better hand rather than risk elimination if there are smaller stacks that are closer to getting the chop.
There is not a thing wrong with liking any particular format. I happen to like the 6-max part of the tournament you mentioned. All I was addressing was the concern over playability of stacks at the ends of tournaments. The thread was about Bingo play and evolved into push/fold and the need to go there once stacks got below a certain threshold. There are ways to adjust when that point of nearly mandatory push/fold comes into play. On the other side of that coin is the constant limping in and the fact that many players continue to do so under 10BB, all the way to where they have 1BB in their stack.
I’m all for there being enough choices for every taste and respect anyone who can master any particular format or game. My personal tastes are more towards deeper format tournaments but those aren’t practical to play all the time. That’s why many of the cash sites have their big games on he weekends. Perhaps this site could have something similar and offer a few longer games then?
It was a joke Miri123. Just not a good one.
Well, my answer was a joke, too. Although the story of my friend is true.
maybe there should be a room for more skilled players, (without it costing millions of schips)
with a rank or smt