According to the updates from pokerlife’s blog (see my blogroll under “WSOP Updates”) quite a few of the well-known professional players are making some fireworks this year at the the WSOP.

Hellmuth tops the list though in my book. This year at least. What can I say? I love his rants. I must have played back his tirade from last year’s WSOP 50 times on my Tivo. It got funnier every time. As a matter of fact, here it is.

Of course sometimes Phil is a bit much to handle, but most of the time, I find myself dying for him to get a bad beat so he can go on a rant. You can’t argue with his success though, he is truly one of the greatest NLH Tournament players out there. Congratulations Phil.On a side not what is it about internet players not being able to get away from a hand after they have raised pre-flop? I have seen some strange things in my days of playing online poker tournaments, and this is something I just can’t get over.Is it due to the fact that they just don’t want to back down? Do they figure “eh, well if he is unpaired i’m no worse than 2:1 against if i’m not dominated, and even then I am only 3:1″??? I really can’t say what these players are thinking before making these awful calls but in the long run, it is a losing play. So here are my tips for the day:

1. Late in a MTT, if you have an average to slightly above average chip stack, don’t raise unless are strong enough to call if someone moves all in on you. Obviously this is a highly situational piece of advice, and it will be up to you observing the table to decide what player can be called with what hand at that point. However I have played in too many tournaments during the late stages, and become an uncomfortable stack because I raised, got re-popped and was forced to fold. Of course you can’t wait for AA at this point so make sure you observe and try and pick the best spots available for a steal.
2. If you do make the first raise and are holding an easily dominated hand or rags, do no be afraid to fold and wait for a better spot to get all your chips in. In Poker you want the other players reacting to you, not the other way around. There is no reason to call off all of your chips on a whim just because you can’t get away from your hand. If you are going to call off all your chips when reraised pre-flop, you may as well just move all in to begin with. When you have less than 10-13 Big Blinds left in your stack there is no sense in betting half your chips with the intention of calling off the rest if you are reraised. Many of these online MTT’s dont give much play toward the later rounds so you may have to be moving all in more than you are comfortable with. THAT IS PERFECTLY FINE. YOU are the aggressor, and YOU must make people react to YOU. Pick the best spot you can, and shove those chips into the middle. you will be surprised how quickly you chip up.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Poker Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.