Fighting the bubble

After I busted out on the bubble in a small tournament yesterday, an acquaintance of mine (a regular at that tournament) asked me why did I play so many hands on the bubble when I was second in chips? In his experience, one should tighten up and not play anything but monsters and wait for either the 3rd or 4th in chips to bust out. Obviously that reasoning is sound, but I disagree with it both specifically in this situation (for the reasons I discuss below) and mostly as a general approach to tournaments.

In the above tournament, it was a straight forward decision not to tighten up because of the bubble, because the tournament took a long time to get down to four, the blinds were already at 1k and 2k compared to an average chip stack of about 8k. This is quite unusual for tournaments (as far as I am aware), but it does raise a situation where if the small stacks do manage to double up before blinded off the game, even the chip leader will leave himself in a dangerous situation if he refuses to make a move. In this instance, my principal of playing my game and per chance busting out is preferable to allowing myself to be blinding out.

My aversion from tightening up on the bubble, however, goes well beyond the above situation. Simply put, Poker is a game of edges, the other players tightening up because of the bubble gives me an edge - it allows me to steal more pots and more blinds; which either places me in a very nice position to go all the way once the bubble bursts or seldom (and you'll be surprised how seldom) find myself busting. I never understood why people work so hard during the entire tournament- finding edges to exploit, taking calculated risks, building their stacks and then stop all that come bubble time. All they do is lose chips (theirs and the potential ones they could have had) while trying to survive, ending with a medium-short stack that is worth pocketing -maybe- 25% over the buy-in.

Playing aggressive during bubble time is just another calculated risk that gives me a big edge and a favorable risk-gain ratio, as a poker player, I would never be able to walk away from that.

- Random -