Ok, for those of you that do not know, Kill Phil is the title of a new book on NL tournament strategy. The basic premise of the book is to give a new player a chance to win a NL tournament no matter how good the opposition, e.g. Phil Hellmuth, Daniel N., whoever.
"All-In Baby"
The first part to understand according to the authors is the 2 different tournament styles which they call;
Small Ball
and Long Ball
Anyone familiar with baseball will get the reference, but I'll explain for the brits
Small ball is the Phil Hellmuth, Daniel N., Gus Hansen, etc method. see some cheap flops and nickle and dime your opponents to death avoiding big pots when you have only a small edge.
Long ball is the All-In move. you try to win your chips in one fell swoop instead of slowly chipping away.
Small ball takes a long time to master and requires superior post flop play.
Long ball can be employed by anyone.
What it accomplishes
According to the authors the Kill Phil strategy will do four things
#1 first and foremost it gives you a chance to win, not to sit there like my most newbs or ok tourney players and get blinded off
#2 it frustrates your opponents, as the authors point out the last thing a small baller wants is someone moving in pre-flop. It completely eliminates their post flop edge and has them guessing on whether their hand is the best. and if it is the best is it worth the huge risk.
#3 It instills fear in your opponents about your weird/wild play
#4 after a while your opponents start calling you with hands they shouldn't because they are fed up with your strategy and want to look you up to see if you really have it.
Well to me this strategy is stupid, but as you know I like to think outside the box so I gave it a try in 3 tournamentsthis weekend.
I had a feeling that by only moving in with huge hands I wouldn't be able to accumulate chips early on and I would end up with a smallish stack when the blinds starting to get meaningful.
I couldn't have been more wrong! First let me say that as an experienced player I added something to the overall strategy.
Tournament one 300+ people Steve-O finishes 43rd after AA loses to JK otherwise I'm near the final table.
I moved in twice early got no callers, with AQ from the bb against 2 limpers, and AA. On my third all-in I had KK and was called by 44. was later called by AT, T9s, and other assorted hands
Tournament two 600+ people (the titan freeroll) Steve-O is cruising the whole tournament but goes card dead after the second break and finishes 11th
Well these people called me with just about any ace after I moved in 7 times without getting called
Tournament three 180 people, Steve-O finishes 167th when KK runs into AA.
Everything the authors said would happen did. They berated me and my strategy saying it isn't poker. they got frustrated and called with bad hands and they all wanted to gun for me.
All in all I would say the Kill Phil strategy is very good (especially if you can tweak it to your already solid game) for online tourneys. there are 3 levels, Kill Phil Basic, Kill Phil Basic Plus, Kill Phil expert. each one is more detailed and is closer to a normal strategy but still involves overbets.
I can't really outline the strategy since it is in depth and I couldn't do it justice in a post. But the book is definetly worth getting although the first hundred pages left me very bored.
Kill Phil
Linear Mode
