Ok, I have only played 4 SNGs since yesterday (2 wins, a 3rd and a bubble) but already my old bogey hand of AQ pre-flop at low/middle blinds has come up again. Well, when I say bogey hand that is probably not the right term... what I mean is, I am caught in two minds (maybe more) about how best to play it.
Originally when I began playing SNGs and did very well, I was very aggressive with it and this approach had a lot of success by 3-betting and 4-bet shoving this hand; I found enough people willing to go to the wire with AJ, A10 and medium pocket pairs that my approach seemed to be +EV to me. But then I took some of the advice from the SNG section of the Cardplayer forum, where many players seem to fold AQ to 3-bets early on, and started playing it much more cautiously, with the result that I was raise/folding pre-flop an awful lot and having to fold to c-bets on whiffed flops even more often, and I was leaking chips as a result. My results dipped noticeably.
So now I am of a mind to return to my previous aggressive approach with AQ pre-flop; my experience of the range of hands people will call my shoves with when 4-bet over is obviously vastly different to the posters on the forum, so I am left in the agonising scenario of having to either a) ignore all my own experience and learnings and trust to the experience of others instead even though it conflicts with mine, or b) ignore well-thought out advice from a selection of experienced and reasonably successful players who specialise in this format. Neither option really sounds very appealing when you lay it out like that. But all in all I think I have a slight preference for failing in my own way, since I have already briefly tried and failed by doing it the other way previously. This might be down to variance, but it also might not.
The hand that prompted this post can be found posted here, along with responses:
http://forums.cardplayer.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=63980
I titled it a "standard" hand, knowing full well that many of them would want to open-fold it pre-flop* and would think my line was spewy and not at all standard, and there are already the nitty voices speaking of how we should fold to the re-raise at this early blind level. They sound convincing, but I have made more by 4-betting than by folding, I am positive.
Gah. This is why poker is such a great game though. Even experienced and highly competent players can disagree on what is optimal. Put me in mind of "Caro's theory of loose wiring" that he speaks about in his classic "Caro's Book Of Poker Tells", where he illustrates two different example hands where the cards dealt to each player and on every street are identical but the end result in terms of winner, pot size and which players were in the hand are very different, because some of the players play their hand differently but plausibly from one example to the next. (The rest of the book is pretty outdated now to be honest, but it was classic at the time). I don't really know where I am going with this, but it popped into my head so I wrote it. I think I'll just let this post trail off quietly...
* hyperbole for comic effect, obv :)
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