Playing 3-way/heads up

[swede123]

Hello there,

I'm kinda new to the poker thing, but have been messing around with some $5 and $10 N/L SNGs at Party and Stars.

It seems to me like once you get to the final 3-4 people very much depends on your luck with the cards. I get to this point last night and am severely short stacked. Blinds are still only at 50/100 so I'm still waiting around for a good starting hand to push all in on.

I finally get good hands two times in a row to double and redouble my stack and take the chip lead (and knock out one other guy). The three of us go back and forth for a while, maybe 20 minutes. Over this time I slowly get a commanding chip lead and as I finally knock out the third guy he makes a comment like "man you guys play weak!" and "I couldn't play that badly even if I tried." The two of us then go back and forth for a bit longer and I ultimately beat him.

This brings me to my question. I've been reading many posts here where people talk about stepping up the aggressiveness at the end. This makes sense to me, you will have the best hand 50% of the time heads up and all that. But still, if you get 7-2, 5-4, 6-3, 9-4, etc over and over should you really make a stand and raise or whatever? Based on the few SNGs I've played it seems to work better for me to wait out a semi decent hand at least, see what happens on the flop and play it aggressively from there.

Perhaps I just haven't played games with blinds getting so severe that you have to take more drastic measures, but it really seems like patience is pretty valuable even playing 3-way and heads up.

Comments? Suggestions?

Thanks,

Swede