Double or Nothing

PokerStars has started a new type of SnG tournament they call "Double or Nothing". From what I can see on the games list these are all single table, 10-player affairs. Half the field doubles up, half hits the rail with nothing. They play, or at least should play, much like the ticket tournaments where the top X players all get the same prize. Except in these you only have to beat half the field.

I've played three of these at the $5 level and have cashed in all of them. They may play differently at the higher entry fee ones, but in the ones I've played I'm pretty sure you could practically fold your way to the money. Certainly playing nothing but premium hands until forced by stack size to do otherwise would appear a solid strategy.

While these are still young and many players are figuring out the proper strategy, I think I'm going to hit them up big time. The turbo ones play out very quickly. Neither of the ones I played lasted much more than 30 minutes. $5 profit in half an hour is better than I usually do at the $0.05 NL tables.

There are some frustrating moments, such as in the last hand of the last one I played. On the bubble, one player was down to less than 1BB and clearly had to just pick a hand and pray. He did, and three others called to see the flop. Since we're on the bubble and all but one win the same amount with the next elimination, the clearly correct strategy here is for everyone to check it down and hope one of us has a better hand than the guy who's all-in. I caught a small piece of the raggedy flop and checked like I should. But Mr. Big Stack figured this would be a great time to push in his huge stack. Idiot. He had top pair, but the short stack had a pocket pair. The all-in forced the other two of us out of the pot. Had I stayed I would have caught queens up and taken the pot. Luckily, the short stack's pocket pair was very small and the pair of sevens Mr. Big Stack caught on the flop took it down. The proper play here -- to check it all the way down -- seems so obvious to me I'm shocked when other players apparently don't see it.

Since I last wrote here I had another of those horrible sessions where I kept getting good cards that came in second. Very frustrating. I had one pretty decent session where I won almost two buy-ins. It didn't quite make up for the big loss, but at least I felt better.

With the help of the Double or Nothing SnGs the Quest bankroll has hit a new high of $131.06. As time allows I'm going to keep working the Double or Nothing tournaments. So far it's easy money.