Recently, I played an online tournament in which I was in 11th place of the twenty-three players remaining. I had $490 locked up, but there was about $9,000 for first and I got dealt a great opportunity to go for it. At the 6,000/12,000 level, a player shoved for 120K from UTG with KQo and I called from the BTN with my 145K stack holding AKo. Winning this hand would give me a top three stack and a shot to possibly win the game. Alas, I was not lucky enough to win the hand and was left with 2 big blinds and sitting in dead last place with twenty-three left.
For a lot of players, this hand would signal the end of the game. For me, it signaled the beginning of the game within the game. When your stack is extremely short in the money of a tournament, you have to temporarily forget about your previous goal of making good decisions to give yourself the best chance of winning the tournament and instead, start making good decisions to give yourself the best chance to get the next pay jump. This is what I like to call the game within the game and most people underestimate the importance of it.
In my tournament, the next pay jump was $570 for 17th place. To get there, I needed to outlast 6 players who had more chips than I did. To this end, I had three important things going for me. First, I was in a tournament where a lot of the players either do not understand or do not care about ICM. This means they make catastrophic mistakes with medium stacks in situations like this one. Secondly, the average stack in this tournament was fairly shallow at just under 15 big blinds. This means that there were a number of short stacks bigger than my own, but still far from the top ten. Fortunately for me, most of these players would be looking to get their chips in for a futile attempt to try and win the tournament because they were playing the wrong game. Lastly, my next hand was in the cutoff which meant I had several opportunities to fold before I would be forced in by the big blind. Here’s how it went.
I tanked down for thirty seconds before folding my next three hands in an attempt to force the stacks at the other tables to play more hands than I had to play. During this time, a player on a different table who was in 19th place with four big blinds decided to get it in with QTs from the SB after an EP open and MP three-bet. In these games, these ranges have QTs crushed and this player ended up losing to AK in a spot he would have avoided had he been playing the correct game. Had he been lucky enough to win that hand he would have moved to 15th place with 11 big blinds. This wouldn’t have drastically increased his chances of winning the tournament given his tendency to overcall too loose vs. tight opening and three-betting ranges.
During this time, we lost a few other players to standard coolers and I found myself in last place with nineteen players left, UTG with 2 big blinds, and K6o. A lot of players will jam any King here because they are unlikely to get a better hand in the big blind, but I decided to again tank and fold because my only goal at this point was to outlast two more players. In the next hand, I was dealt J6o in the BB. A tight player opened and got a call from the player in the small blind. Had this player not called, maybe I would have because it was unlikely that I’d be able to outlast two more players with less than a big blind left. When he did call, I decided it was much more unlikely that my hand would win in a three way pot vs. strong ranges than that. I folded leaving myself with just over three quarters of a big blind, most of which would be in play next hand. In that hand, the Small Blind lost with T9o vs. the EP opener’s ATs on a QT4 rainbow board. He’d started the hand with eleven big blinds. The opportunity to play with players like him is a blessing that is not lost upon me. On another table, a similarly skilled player shoved six big blinds from UTG with K8o and lost to UTG+1 who held KJo. That was enough to get me the pay jump I was seeking and win me the game within the game.
This game is a surprisingly lucrative one. The proceeding five hands lasted a total of five minutes. During this time, all I did was tank for thirty seconds and fold questionable hands. These five minutes of “work” earned me an $80 pay jump which equates to an hourly rate of $960. Not bad for clicking the fold button.
At this point, the players were consolidated down to two tables and I was forced in by the BB with A3o. Fortunately, I won the hand against the Small Blind who had K4o. This win tripled my 0.75 bb stack to 2.2 big blinds and propelled me from 17th place to 17th place. The guy next to last had triple my stack, so I expected the game to be over at this point. I’ll spare you the details, but I instead found a few big hands, continued this laddering process, and ended up finishing in 4th place for $3,600.
I didn’t win outright, but in a sense, I had great results in both games. When I had a super short stack with very little chance of winning the tournament, I successfully won the game within the game. This is essentially a satellite to get to the next pay jump. Like any other satellite, it doesn’t much matter how many chips you get there with and it’s an extremely profitable game when your opponents play as if they were playing a tournament. When I had a decent stack with a shot at winning the tournament, I disregarded laddering, played to win, and lost a standard flip to take 4th. Even this feels like a win in a tournament in which I had two big blinds with twenty-three players left. This goes to show that focusing on winning the game within the game doesn’t mean you can’t win the game.
