$11 180 man PKOs - The Goldmine

As promised, I'm just going to give you guys some of my thoughts about these new SnGs now spread on PokerStars. I won't go too deep into strategy because I'm still not too sure myself about what works the best, I'm still testing out push/folding ranges.

First off all, for those of you who haven't played a PKO yet, this is how it goes. The buy-in is split into the regular prize pool and a bounty, much like in regular bounty tournaments. In the case of the $11s, $5 goes toward the prize pool and $5 towards the bounty, and of course, $1 as rake. Now here comes the tricky part. When you knock a player out, you receive half their bounty value while the other half is added to your bounty. For example, if you were to knock a player out on the first hand, you would receive $2.50 straight into your account, and your own bounty will increase to $7.50. SkyPoker have actually used this system for a while for their own bounty tournaments.

The main reason why these tournaments are so profitable at the moment is because the regs seem to be avoiding them, but I can't understand why. As soon as you introduce the word "bounty" into a tournament, the fish just flock to it. And it's because of these fish that are so narrow minded and solely focused on taking bounties that their calling ranges are so well defined. Basically, if the fish has you covered, you can shove pretty much any marginally strong hand and expect to be called by near enough any 2 cards. In the past week I've seen over 50BB shoves snap called by hands such as Q2o, 65s and much much worse. You can tell who this kind of fish are within around 10 hands at the table, and better yet if you have HEM, you don't even have to pay attention, it'll flag them up for you.

Then all of a sudden the situation is completely reversed when the fish get short, they become absurdly passive. Especially around the bubble, the fish decide to call 80/90% of hands pre-flop only to play fit or fold poker on the flop, it makes for very each chip accumulation.

It's a combination of these two factors that have got me thinking that a loose aggressive small ball strategy, if that makes sense, is best. Even with a short stack, I believe that min-raises pre with a very wide range followed by 1/3rd pot flop c-bets are the best way to go around these tournaments. A decent push/fold game can still work but it needs to be altered to take into account the serious drop in fold equity, e.g. 98s and similar hands become less valuable when shoving but are worth opening, even with less than 15BB stacks.

Well there's a few of my thoughts on the games, it maybe wasn't the most structured post in the world but hopefully it gave you guys a little insight into what I'm thinking at the moment, which is kind of the point of a blog! But that's enough writing for now, it's time to jump in and crush the games. Good luck to all you grinders and I'll speak to you all soon!