So i'm looking for some MTT training help.

feel free to post comments, suggestions and advice.

or send a pm if u can offer a bit more personal via a chat service or something...

about me:

I play small ball. similar style to DN / hellmuth in tourneys.

anyways. I've won my share of 100 man tourneys, i've won my share of deep stack 500+ players.


I do well throughout, but if i had to pick 1 weak section of my game its the following...

my ability to make correct decisions late in a deep stack event with decent structure.


Example. LIVE tournament, deep stack event I have 20k. blinds 600/1200 - structure is increase every 40 mins started with 800 players. now down to 90.

So... i guess my question is.. can someone point me to some literature, or something that i can read/watch to help build my tool belt for this stage of play.

cheers

i've read HOH1 and HOH2

Not sure what exactly you're getting at here. You have like 18 or so BBs and your M is 10ish, you basically have a reshove stack. It may have been a "deep stack" tournament, but you certainly are not playing deep stacked poker in this example.

if the players are letting you win uncontested then raise, if not wait for a hand and reraise

I guess what i'm asking is, what players or plays are better than any other.

My example was bad, cuz in tat example i shoved and got out drawn. I'm looking at an M of 15more so.

a little room to work with, especially with longer levels.

Is there a play style that works best here? be tight? be aggro? wait on hands?

do what the table allows

No wonder i never got into being a tournament player.

You're just not giving us enough info to make any kind of recommendation here.

Every situation is different. There is no blanket strategy for how to play with an M around 15. If the table is tight, steal as many blinds/antes as you can. If the table is loose, then pick a spot to reshove, preferably on a squeeze.

Ok. this is generally how I do play in these spots. I guess it just seemed like a leak since its common that I get into these situations (20% of the field left and i have an M of around 15)

Well, you'll need a bigger stack than this to play smallball poker and steal the blinds because when you're down below to almost 10-12M other big stacks will push you around. There are two main criterias when playing smallball:

1. Have a decent stack compared to the rest of the table (You gotta be on the upper half of the avg. table stack)
2. Your opponents tend to play tight and therefore this allows us to steal the blinds and keep the pots small when we make plays.

no not true at all

If there are 5 players around the table that's also playing smallball, plus some aggresive ones. Smallball will be kinda useless in spots like this. There's nothing in trying to steal blinds if people tend to both limp and raise you.


And also, trying to play smallball with a short stack won't work as bigger stacks will just push you around most likely. They will force us to make more drastic moves most of the time and stealing will be very hard. Someone with 40-50M got absolutely no respect for someone with -15M, in a regular MTT.

Please tell me why this is wrong and let's discuss this

Where did I say we were playing small ball? I did say look to reshove - thats about as opposite to small ball as possible.

I also qualified the stealing with "if the table is tight." That means people aren't contesting pots and are mostly waiting for real hands - it doesn't matter what your stack size is - as long as you have over 10-12 BBs you can steal if the table dynamic is like this.

so we make up situations to justify arguments, if that's the case ok

There is no right answer to all of the above. It's all in reading the multitude of variables at the crux of any given situation and making the best decision possible. If this means folding AQ or TT to a raise and a reraise, so be it. If it means coming over the top of a raise and a call with AK, so be it.

Maktoub...so it is written, so it shall be done.