[Brad F.]

I've had a really good run in MTT's in the past month with four final tables and one win in 19 tourneys on PS and Absolute, and obviously I've wanted to evaluate my play to see if it's luck or if there is a pattern or what.

I spent a good time yesterday looking at my hand histories on Stars. I'm quite an aggressive player, and I usually win about 30-40 hands without a showdown in my good tourneys.

Smart players play back at my LP steals, but I luckily don't run into the positions where I'm put to the test too often.

For example, one of the better players on AP (TLB winner twice in the last two months on AP, but I won't name him)
noticed my raising tendencies, and played back at me with A-J in the blind. Lucky for me, that time I had pocket aces.

Getting back on topic, good players know the tendencies for MP3, CO, Button to all open raise with dead money in the pot. Therefore instead of just calling with good hands (calling is the new raising) they do reraise more often because they know that they can get you off of your hand.

But if you raise with a wide variety of hands and raise to an amount to which you can fold to big reraises, I think the open steal is a +EV thing to do. You get big pots when you do raise with premier hands, you win smaller pots when you are not called and you lose smaller pots when you are reraised.

You have to lose a lot of the small pots in order to make open stealing -EV in my opinion. Especially if you are a good post flop player, when you are called by the blinds.

Brad