Home tournament, strategy for bad blind structure?

[Marc Desjardins]

We play a hold'em no-limit tournament a couple times each week with my friends. There's usually 5 of us but sometimes we can go up to 8. We use to play regular games, but some of the more novice players weren't having much fun so we now play almost always tournament. The problem is that the structure is pretty bad (we need to keep them short) but we get to play 2 or 3 each night.

Here's the structure

we start with 1500 in chips

Blinds move up every 20 minutes

level 1: 10/25
level 2: 25/50
level 3: 50/100
level 4: 100/200
level 5: 200/400
level 6: 300/600

Second place wins his buy-in back (or twice his buy-in when we have more than 6 players) and first place gets the rest.

With 20 minutes per round, it means we play about 10 hands at each level at the beginning at a little more as people go broke.

So with usually about 7500 chips in play, it becomes a crapshoot more often than usual.

So, with this structure, what would your strategy be? I try to play a regular tournament strategy, but I am not succesfull at all. I wonder if I should play tighter, but this doesn't sound right, since I will get blinded out pretty fast if I don't win some pots early and if I play more aggresive, it becomes pretty dangerous since most of them have no idea about pot odds and will call to the river with second pair or top pair weak kicker and of course with any draws.

I'm looking forward to your feedback, thanks in advance

[PotatoStew]

My guess: see many more flops in the first one or two levels as cheaply as possible, but only make a move if you hit the flop strongly. If you win a few hands and get a good lead, tighten up considerably.

Take the above advice with a grain of salt...

[Douper]

conversly if alot of players are going out in the first couple of levels, you might want to play tighter than usual.

There was a post in the STT forum about beating the party $10+1 SNG's which suggested limping with any PP 22-JJ raising AK QQ+ and folding everything else until the 50/100 level.

[smoore]

You could probably fold every hand for the first two levels and still have T1000. Unless you get a premium hand or some little PP that you can limp with just fold. Once you get to level 3 you'll have 7-10BB left. Here's where you wake up and start playing. Go into push or fold mode until you either bust or gain more than 10BB. You're right, this is a crapshoot so just play craps. The push/fold really confuses most home players and confused players tend to call. Make sure you're willing to go to showdown with whatever you're pushing with.

[Arsene Lupin III]

Go all in on tight players with any cards after level 4.

-adam