I'm sick and tired of playing "ultra-tight" in my weekly B+M $30 freeze-out. I've decided that since I only make the money about 20% of the time now, that I'm going to change my overall strategy. Tonight I went and played super-aggressive, and it worked. My goal was to establish an early chip lead - which I did. I ended up losing half my stack with AK though. A guy reraised me with A5 and you know how the story goes.

Anyways, I'd like to point out that I'm not playing stupidly aggressive, just picking my spots and shooting it up. I'm going for the WIN. I knew I had accomplished my goal when another guy at the table made this comment:

"Damn it Travis, you're raising AGAIN??!! Jeez. You're making this very tough." That made me feel really good. For the first time in a while I had TOTAL control of the table. I was playing ultra-aggressive AND getting respect.

Here's my bust out hand, what would you have done? My opponent was the one guy at the table who I really wanted to bust. He had about the same amount of chips as me (a little more), but he was TERIIBLE. He called down another bad player with Q high and won a huge pot. LOL. I knew I just needed to make a hand against him - any kind of decent hand - and I could get those chips.

He's 2 to my right. I'm in LP and have about $T6000, blinds are 150/300. He limps in MP, I raise to $T800 with K9s, he's the only caller. $2050 in the pot now. Flop comes the best I could hope for, 67K. He checks, I bet out $1000, he reraises me allin. Now here's where my read on the guy comes into play. I'd seen him on more than a few occasions raising with terrible hands and calling raises with trash, then calling bets on the flop/turn/river with NOTHING, and check-raise bluffing with nothing. I call. He has 67 for two-pair. Obviously this would have been an easy lay down to a strong player, but I felt my hand was better. Was I crazy?

Also, what do you guys think of my new strategy? I feel that my post-flop play has gotten much better recently, but it is much more difficult. It's also much more fun

Oh yeah. This is good for a laugh. I was sitting at about $T2400 after a bad beat and caught AQs, went allin, and a guy called me with T2o. LOL. My hand held up thankfully. Can you imagine that? Calling an allin with T2o, wow.

I think the problem is that people play WAY too aggressive on the flop or way too tight on the preflop in most tourneys early on. Everyone keeps thinking about doubling up with their one good hand. I know I'm focused and playing my best when I'm trying to get solid wins that slowly builds my stack. Sure, I love going all in when I have the nuts, but truthfully, I've done well in a lot of tourneys were I never got the nuts - just outplayed people and played smart.

I play loose on the preflop early on (average around 35% flops seen) for two reasons
1) I can see a lot of flops for cheap
2) If I nail the flop, over aggressive people put my EV rating through the roof.

Later on, you see people playing a lot better until they're in the money, and then things start getting a bit ugly.