Last night I played in one of Poker Stars $4+$0.40 180 player NL hold’em tournaments. I’ve written before about how I’m trying to get as much tournament experience as possible for as cheap as possible and this tournament seems a good candidate. $1500 in starting chips, 15 minute blind levels and from what I could tell a reasonable standard of play once the riff raff has been dealt with (unlike the ultra low stakes SNG’s I’m getting killed in over at Absolute – it’s a good thing I’m good at handling bad beats, but that’s another topic).

I won’t go into too much detail but I will say that I was feeling good throughout, applying what I’ve been reading from Harrington where I felt it was appropriate and playing well enough to make it through the first two breaks and into the money (top 18 places pay) with a chip stack slightly above average.

Unfortunately though by the time the bubble burst the blinds and antes were large even for the bigger stacks and for a while play turned into a bit of an all-in fest. I lost a couple of races, most notable being my 77 in the SB vs the BB’s A5o where I was a 70/30 favourite against a player who I’d slowly been getting the better of all tournament only to lose half my stack when an ace came on the flop.

Into the final 15 or so players I was severely short stacked which gave me a chance to put into practice Harrington’s strategy about playing in the “Red Zone” (where your stack is less than 5 times the size of the pot) which worked great until my KTs ran into QQ and didn’t improve, double up there though and I would have been a contender for the final table.

So, in the end I was out in 13th place after 2.5 hours of play. Not a bad result, except for the fact that the prizes are very top heavy in this tournament and there’s no significant money until the final three. I’m almost embarrassed to say but for all my work I took a measly $8.64 for 13th, that’s a huge net profit of $4.24 .

Hardly a way to get rich, but if you want to get cheap multi-table tournament experience at any time of the day against a wide variety of opponents then it’s pretty hard to go past.