Headhunter Tournaments

The Cryptologic sites have introduced a new type of tournament called "Headhunter". The concept is that every player has a price on their head, and if you knock someone out of the tournament, you get a percentage of their "head value". As you knock someone out yourself, your own head value goes up. At the end of the tournament, you get money back depending on the value of the the bounties you have taken.

To fund this, half the buy-in goes to the general prize fund, and the rest goes towards the bounties.

Anyway, I played my first one of these last night. I'm not sure whether I like them or not. They are basically like a crapshoot, but with a difference.

The good news is that I finished 4th out of 308 entrants. The entry fee was $5, and I won around $70 which was made up of roughly $55 for the prize money, and $15 for the heads I scalped (I only knocked out 4 players on the way).

The bad news is that if this was a standard tournament, I guess my prize money would have been more like $110. (Remember only 50% of the entry fee is put to the prize fund, and I won $55). It's obvious that the way to make your money is to knock a lot of people out on your way to a high finish.

The stategy is therefore very simple. If you hit your hand hard, get all your money in because you will get called. People are prepared to call with any old crap just for a chance to knock you out. Unfortunately, this does mean you have to wait for a hand. Pushing on a bluff just doesn't work - well, not early on anyway.

Here's a brief summary of what happened:

I started off badly. After about 10 hands in, I limped UTG with 77. Got about 4 callers. Flop came down 579 with 2 diamonds. I had hit my set, but didn't want anyone drawing cheaply to their flush. Therefore I pushed. All folded except one, who had limped in with 96s, and had therefore flopped their straight. My redraw didn't come, and I was suddenly down to 300 in chips.

I managed to double up with AK, then triple up. I was suddenly up to just over 2000 when this hand happened: I was on the button with 99. An early position player raised to 200 and he got 6 callers including me and the blinds. Flop was T94 with 2 clubs. The blinds checked, then an all-in, then another, then another, then a no-brainer from me. I suspected someone was on a flush draw, but the only hand I was worried about was TT for a higher set. It turned out the others were KK, JJ and A5 of clubs. Fortunately my hand held up and I raked in a massive pot of 8500 including 2 heads. :-).

I then had a long period of being absolutely card-dead whilst people were pushing all around me. However, all this time I managed to keep my stack fairly even with the odd steal. Once we got near the bubble, I took my 3rd scalp when my QQ busted a short-stack. I managed to make the money (top 40) quite comfortably in the end.

The rest is a bit of a blur until I got to the final table as the short stack on 16k. However, I managed to triple up with KTs, then double up with AK to take me up to 80k and in 2nd position. My 4th scalp came when I knocked out a very short-stack with AQ.

With the blinds getting very high it soon got down to push/fold from everyone. I was down to about 40k with blinds around 4k/8k (IIRC). I pushed with QJ in the small blind. The big blind called with KJ and had me dominated. My Q never appeared and I was out in 4th. gg me.

It was a fun tournament, and whilst the payout was less than a standard MTT, I have to also remember that I almost certainly would not have got as many chips as I did due to the nature of the game.

Was it only yesterday I said I haven't been doing well in MTTs? Hmmmmmm!