Clarification of Large Tourney Strategy

Just read a decent article on large field tournament strategy. http://www.pocketfives.com/ACA97406-83C6-45EC-B775-5AA30E8EEAE5.aspx

The punctuation is crappy, but I think he makes a lot of sense. Here are the basics:

Early stage: Your goal is to see the flop cheaply and out flop your opponents. You are basically looking for two pair or better and trying to trap your opponents. Bluffs at abandoned pots are ok only if they are done very cheaply.

Middle stage: Play tight solid poker. Raise big cards preflop and if you hit top pair and good kicker, bet big. If you miss, do not bluff. It costs too much money if you are called.

Late stage: Blinds are big and you should be happy just winning them. You want to win all of your hands preflop. Steal in the right spots with good cards. Other players will start getting desperate and it will be easy to chip up quickly if you are picking on the right players.

I have played in these modes at different times in tournaments, but I don't think it was ever quite in that order. This is definitely something I will have to experiment with.

As for my bad run, I have avoided playing poker the last 2 days. On Monday I played 1 $55 sit at Party. My idea was to record every hand and submit it to 2+2 for evaluation. The problem was, it took too long to record my hands and I don't think there is a good way to summarize everything so someone would take the time to read it.

I think the only way to do it is copy my tournament summary into a post with a link to the party poker hand replayer. Then you can just sit back and watch the tournament play out. It may take too long for someone to watch the entire thing, so maybe I could edit out the hands I don't play except for hands where I see someone do something stupid to give my critics some background on my opponents.

The funny thing was, I did not play a hand for the first 3 rounds. I got short stacked and went into all in mode and I was not called the first 5 or 6 times I did it. Then in the middle of writing down the previous hand I was dealt 88. There was a small raise in front of me so the play was all in or fold. I wasn't quite sure that my reraise would be enough to get him to fold. While I am thinking about it, Party Poker timed me out. It did not even go into my timebank!. After it folded me, two other players called and it turned out that the original raiser had 99 and one of the callers had over cards. I would have lost the hand.

The very next hand I was dealt AK and went to bet. Unfortunately it folded me, because I forgot to hit the "I am Back" button. Dammit. I pretty much stopped writing everything down after that.

Somehow I managed to make it in the money by continuing to move all in and winning blinds. I made it to the final two and I was down in chips 2-1. We traded blinds back and forth and then he raised 2x the blind from the button. That seemed weak, so I moved all in with 98 suited. He turned over a pair of tens. I should have remembered from earlier that he raised 2x the blind with a good hand when it was 3 or 4 handed. I should have taken my time. Anyway, the $150 came in handy.