I Got 2nd Place In An SnG 6-Max Tournament Playing Bingo

Hand 1
Hand 2
Hand 3
Hand 4
Hand 5
Hand 6
Hand 7
Hand 8
Hand 9
Hand 10
Hand 11

Bingo is a strategy.

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First of all, you were 2nd out of 6 players, congratulations, that’s amazing!!!

Second of all, did you really need a separate thread to brag about this? If your point is to prove that bingo is a strategy (which you haven’t proven at all), you could’ve just posted these hands in the bingo thread.

Third of all, the one who got 1st place didn’t play bingo, so the no-bingo strategy seems to beat the bingo strategy, if you wanna call it strategy at all.

But good for you. I hope next time you win first place out of 3 players in a quick 3 seat SnG, then you can really brag! :wink:

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I beat 4 out of the 6 players. My strategy is clearly better than theirs.

I almost won the last hand. I had a pair of fives on the flop, but julax311 beat me by getting a pair of eights on the river. Clearly bingo is a strategy. If it weren’t for the pair of eights, I would have won this tournament.

My ultimate goal will be to win an MTT using this strategy.

Since you’re bragging about bingo and what a good strategy it is, let’s see how it’s working for you, and how you managed to bank 810 chips so far.

What you should have posted was these hands:

Hand 449421547

Hand 449421199

And point out the nice things you keep saying in the chat. You must be a treasure to play against :slight_smile:

You went all in preflop with 10-2 and you got called by 4-3 and 4-9 and busted them both out because your 10 paired. You call that a strategy?

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Something’s not right about your 11 hand sequence. In the first hand, you eliminated 1 player. In the 2nd hand, there are two players gone from the table. Huhwha?

I’m inclined to believe that Bingo is viable in games that are short handed, and that have a short duration.

You’re not going to get very far in an MTT that way. You might win a 6-seat game, but you’re still lucky if you’re shoving every hand preflop and make it through 11 hands. Your game could have ended the very first hand. (In which case, maybe that’s an “advantage” of bingo, it gets you out of losing tournaments quickly so you can try to win another tournament sooner.)

2nd place in a 6-hand game is only slightly over breaking even. For a 6-hand game to really pay off, you need to come in 1st.

If you can do it consistently, and place often enough to make money given the payout structure of the tournament, THEN I think you can call it a strategy. But if your “strategy” doesn’t consistently win you more chips than it loses, then I don’t think it’s a very good strategy.

Of course, when it comes to all-in heads-up, it’s often a coin flip anyway, so it’s not like it’s that bad of a strategy – you could just as well have won 1st. I just think it’s a better strategy to shove only when you have good shoving cards heads-up. When it gets to heads-up, your opponent who isn’t playing bingo is probably going to fold until he hits good cards. If you eliminated the first 5 players, your stack is going to dominate him, and he’ll need you to be wrong 3-4 times to get you, and can’t be wrong once.

Until I’d played a lot of heads-up poker, mostly what I’d do when I got to a heads-up situation is shove until one of us won. Spoiler alert: It didn’t win me many heads-up games. But if I’d put out 4 opponents at a 5-seat table and got a 5x stack advantage over the surviving player, I bet it would have won a lot more.

I think “all in preflop shove, regardless of holding cards” is a reasonable strategy at times, and if you do it for 2-3 hands in a row, it can make you a lot of chips very quickly, albeit at great risk, which will advantage a more considered strategy better in the long run.

When’s the best time to do it? In my opinion:

  1. Opening a tournament. No time has been invested, you bust out, you’re only out the entry chips. No big deal. If you hit, you’re instantly doubled or tripled up over the competition, which can be a great advantage. Would I do this in the real world? Not in a tournament where the entry fee is real money, and a substantial amount.
  2. When you’re desperate. If you’re down to only a couple BB, and you need to double up quickly a few times just to get back into the game. You won’t be eliminating opponents, but you’ll be at risk of being eliminated. But you’re at risk of being eliminated anyway.
  3. Heads up, with stack advantage of 3-4+:1. They have to be right 2-3 times in a row to win, and you only have to be right once. Each hand is probably close to a coin flip. You’ll probably prevail.

A slightly more judicious all-or-nothing strategy might do even better. Consider trying:

  1. Fold (unless premium cards, or SB or BB), shove any other time. This might actually be worse, since you’ll only be playing good cards, which will tell your opponents if you’re in the hand at all, get out. But your BB and SB hands, you’ll be wide open in your range. Will you save more chips by folding most of the time? Hard to say. The constant pressure of making every hand an all-in situation for the rest of the table will force everyone else to bleed blinds and antes until they realize that there’s no relief from the pressure you’re placing on them, and they resign themselves to calling… It’s worth experimenting with, I’d say.
  2. Bingo until you’re 3-4x your starting chips, then change strategies to something more conventional. Each successive elimination brings you diminishing returns, at the benefit of reduced risk. But over the long run the high variability of the strategy may make you more vulnerable, and the deeper you get into a tournament, the more you want to avoid the big beat that cuts your stack in half or more.
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In hand 449421547, I had 42 offsuit. It’s not a very good hand, but I got a pair of twos and would have won if lolo18 didn’t have the pair of aces.

In hand 449421199, I had the best hand out of everyone who went all-in. I just got unlucky and lost. It happens. Bingo relies on luck. That’s how it works.

You posted the hands in the wrong order.

And I didn’t say anything mean in chat. I was just asking them to guess what time it was. And it was bingo time.

The order of the hands doesn’t matter, they just show the way you play, and the cards you’re going all in preflop with. “I would have won if” and “I had the best hand but” and ifs and buts and could’ve would’ve should’ve don’t change anything. If going all in preflop with 42o is your strategy, and you still call it a strategy, good luck to you!!

I didn’t say you were mean in the chat, I was just talking about how you’re bragging about your bingo. You should maybe consider not bragging till AFTER you’ve won the hand. What time is it? It’s bingo time… And you go all in, and you lose. What’s the point? :roll_eyes:

Telling them that it’s bingo time let’s them know that I’m going all-in no matter what I have. Bingo is bingo, whether you win or lose. And when I get a bingo, I usually say BINGO in chat. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you have a bingo. If I don’t have a bingo, then I keep playing if I can.

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Don’t worry I’m sure you’ll get a lot of support for the way you play from professional bingo players and bingo supporters. Someone will even come and tell us how they won 1 MTT playing bingo the whole time, which statistically means absolutely nothing. Winning 1 MTT in your whole life playing bingo will prove nothing at all. When you manage to win many many MTTs playing this way, then it’s a different story. But like puggy said, placing 2nd in a 6 seat SnG means nothing, and even winning 1 MTT out of hundreds played, using this “strategy” doesn’t prove anything.

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I think it’s fair to give the table the information. It really reinforces the strategy, because you’re TELLING them, no matter what, every hand is going to be an all-or-nothing proposition to them, until you’re gone from the table.

A lot of players, I would predict, would feel very uncomfortable calling if it’s not in their usual strategy to be that willing to put all at risk preflop. So, as long as you’re not being totally obnoxious about it and rubbing their faces in their losses (it’s really pretty random who wins a given hand in this style of play after all, not your superior skill or decision making ability) announcing that you’re always going to shove is both fair to them, and likely to get them to understand that they’re going to HAVE to call at some point in order to play a hand, and thus they’ll be more likely to call with marginal cards, rather than wait on a premium pair to hit them.

I think it’s a nearly essential part of the strategy, really.

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Selective shoving worked pretty well for the Halloween SnG promo, but they were 9-player tables. As such I’m not entirely surprised by the results @Max17903 had. Your last point in that paragraph is pretty key: there is always another one starting if you lost. So you get your points for the LB and move on to the next one. You are definitely gambling… but… if you have a bigger picture you are working on, frequent shoving is an efficient albeit risky method.

This is essentially what you do in the 500 B+R Bankroll builder or the other Rebuy tournaments. See the thread below.

Also, I would suggest to @Max17903, if you want to try this in an MTT without rebuys, the 2.5K Ruby tournaments are quite shove-happy early on. Of course, the Freerolls would be less expensive and a much, much more difficult task as they frequently get 200 or so entrants.

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Only until the rebuy period is over. You can’t do it all through the tourney till the end. Those who do it do it because they can still rebuy if things go wrong. After the rebuy period, if things go wrong, they’re out, no more lifelines.

I don’t think posting the results of an experiment is “bragging.”

There’s no bragging in science, only results.

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So now it’s an experiment? And it’s science? SPG aren’t you the one who, in every thread, refuted any “results” posted as being scientifically insufficient to come up with a conclusion, saying you need thousand and thousands of hands to reach an acceptable conclusion?
Now you call this 1 game an experiment, and science?

The bragging is not in posting the hands anyway, but rather in the spirit of “look at me I’m playing bingo and placing”. If you don’t see it as bragging, that’s up to you, but please don’t call it science :wink:

Also, in science, you should post both results, the positive and the negative, not selectively post the ones that support your theory :nerd_face:

Well, er, yes, that’s how poker works. Your hand wins, unless someone else makes a better hand. You can even win a pair of 2s. Or High Card. Unless someone beats you.

In an all-in situation, it’s a 5-card game, and you don’t know who the best hand is (usually) until the River. The only luck is in who stays in the hand with you to make what could be the better hand, which is determined entirely by the ordering of the shuffled deck.

It takes a lot of the decision making out of the game (do I play or fold? Do I bet or don’t I? How much do I bet?) The only decision making left at that point is in the other players, to call or not. And they don’t have enough information to make the right call. Before the flop is the hardest time to decide this, and they’re going to be wrong a fair bit of the time.

If you’re a bad enough player, automatically picking the same answer might well do you better than you otherwise would.

If you’re wrong the first time, you’re out. If you’re right the first time, you get a 1-mistake buffer on the next time. And so on, as long as you keep winning, eliminating someone else.

If everyone folds, you don’t risk anything but you gain only the blinds. But you also risk that someone might not fold because they’re holding a premium hand, and then you take a big loss, or possibly eliminated if it’s the first hand. I’d assume about half the time, you’re out in the first hand, the rest of the time you may last a while.

I still think you’re very vulnerable to someone who is patient and knows when it’s a good time to call. The only way to beat them is if they never get a good time to call, or doesn’t get a good time to call until your stack dominates theirs. Even then, they can still beat you in successive hands if they’re patient enough. I do this heads-up when I need to, and my success rate is better than the stack ratios when I’m dominated, so I must be doing something well.

So until I’m proven wrong, my thinking on this is that if you’re not a good player, this is a good strategy since it’s better than beating yourself through poor decision making, but that you’re vulnerable to a good player who knows how to play heads-up, and knows when to call and when to shove.

While 1 run isn’t conclusive, I don’t think anyone suggested it is.

And yes, I think it was done as an experiment, which is part of the scientific method.

I think bingo is a strategy, just not a very good one.

And yes, all results should be shared, not just the ones that support one position or another.

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It’s one thing to take one side of the discussion, and another thing to embellish and reinforce that side with things that were never said or suggested.

Did the OP suggest anywhere that it was an experiment in the name of science? No!
Did the OP post all results obtained from playing in that experimental way, showing times he won and times he lost playing this way, to make it a scientific project? No!
Does this one game prove anything scientifically? No!

Did he say anything that suggests bragging? Well, maybe:

The loose use of the term “clearly”, the conclusion that the bingo strategy is better than that of other players because 4 of them were busted out, and the rest of the things said in the chat during the hands in question, all suggest bragging and no scientific method.

Now if you don’t agree that there was bragging, that’s fine. But don’t blame me for disagreeing that this was a scientific experiment either :slight_smile:

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Another important way to assess the worthiness of a strategy is how well does it do against itself.

We can look at this most simply in heads up. Every game would end on the first hand, or possibly the second, third, etc. in the event of a chopped pot. One player will win as many hands as any other who plays this strategy. There’s no “better” way to play bingo, such that a better player will beat the lesser player more than 50%.

Can a player with greater experience and skill play this strategy better than the neophyte? No. The strategy is so simple that to play it at all is to play peak talent bingo. This is both its greatest strength, and its greatest weakness.

The only thing that an experienced Bingo player can do to improve their game, or to do better than 50% against another Bingo player, is to abandon bingo, and play other strategies.

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Anyway, it was an interesting scientific experiment. Bingo is clearly a valid strategy.

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