Combating Aggression and Adapting to New Fast-Paced Formats
PokerStars Championship Barcelona is almost here. The first events begin in less than a week, with the PokerNews live reporting team arriving shortly thereafter to provide coverage from all of the major events on the schedule, including the €50,000 Super High Roller, the two €25,500 Single-Day High Rollers, the €10,300 High Roller, and the €5,300 Main Event.
As usual, a number of players are qualifying for events on PokerStars by various means, including via the popular Spin & Go format.
Not long ago, our Sarah Herring chatted with poker pro and coach Yaniv "Sentin7" Rosen whose poker advice can be found on Upswing Poker and his own Spin & Go Strategy site. Among the strategy topics the pair discussed was how best to play against players in such events who have qualified via Spin & Gos.
"Sentin" starts out distinguishing between recreational Spin & Go players (several of whom do qualify for the events) and the more serious Spin & Go "pros" who have developed game-specific strategies to profit consistently in the hyper-turbo, short-handed sit-n-go format.
Those coming from the latter group will be specialists in short-handed play, and likely to be more aggressive than the average player. Sentin offers tips for dealing with such aggression, emphasizing the importance of not backing down and either calling down with medium-to-strong hands ("give them rope to hang themselves," he says) and/or being aggressive in response.
From there the conversation moves on to talk about Spin & Go strategy as well as adapting to other new, fast-paced online poker formats such as the brand new "Spin & Go Max" variation just introduced this week. Take a look:
