Hand selection short handed
 

Playing a home tournament recently, down to 4 player, $600 in chips on the table and i hold roughly $300. Top three places pay. Iam utg, dealt K [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]7 [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] and raise blinds (which are $6-$12) to $30, guy behind me goes all in for just 25 more or so. Puts me in a position of doubling him up (which I did).

So the question is, I know that I must increase the number of hands I play short handed, but what do you all feel are the limitations of this (i.e play K-9, Q-T, etc. more agressively, but avoid rasing with hands like this one).

2- I am thinking that this play was a little more viable because of my big stack and what had been pretty tight play on the bubble. What hands do you push with in these situations?

Re: Hand selection short handed
 

I think you played it fine. You have half the chips on the table. You certainly can raise here for many reasons:
1. You will have position on anyone who plays excep the button, and the button is a short stack at $55.
2. Your have an easy laydown to a real re-raise pre flop, and can bring a lot of pressure post flop if someone just calls.
3. As you alluded to, your raises will win the blinds outright most of the time. As the big stack at bubble time, you can almost raise with any two excepting those cases where one of the blinds is more likely to call due short stack status.

Your call was automatic. I would raise UTG or folded to on the button with a jack or higher in my hand or two coordinated lower cards. If you start getting played with more, you can tighten it up, but you are in a dominating position and most people wont want to tangle with you without a strong hand.

Re: Hand selection short handed
 

Raise mercilessly. It's a simple math problem. You will steal a ton of blinds, and when you do get played with you are likely to be no worse then about 60-40 dog. Any opponent needs to win two of those in a row to really become dangerous to your stack. They will only win 2 in a row about 1/3 of the time. May look ugly calling and flipping over kxs, but this is one of the situations unique to tourneys where -chip EV is outweighed by the + real money EV.