Party/Empire SnGs in later stages...

[Sidekick]

When playing Party/Empire SnGs in the later stages, say blinds of 100/200 and up.

I feel confident this has come up before, but after doing several searches I can really only find mostly indirect references or passing comments regarding this subject. My apologies if I've simply missed a good thread on this topic.

Once the Party/Empire SnGs reach this point, are they mostly crap shoots as far as getting lucky with your hands? I haven't played too many so far, but as rapidly as the blinds come around and as quickly as the blinds escalate, I have been unable to wait (in most of the tourneys I've been in) for any type of good starting hands. What would normally be at best a marginal hand suddenly becomes a must steal attempt on the blinds, etc.

A common situation I've run across so far is that I've doubled up (or even somewhat better, but not in the chip lead) and the table is down to say 4 or 5 players and blinds are at least 100/200. You have to be able to steal the blinds at least a couple of times every few orbits in order to maintain yourself, but if you have doubled your chip stack to about 1600 to 2000 chips then a min raise won't discourage most folks (there are exceptions of course) from calling your min raise.

However, doing a 3x BB raise winds up making you put in about 1/3 or so of your chip stack which most posters I've seen recommend as a push situation or at least a borderline push situation later in SnGs. Assuming you do a 3x BB bet, how do you handle these situations when you get called and the flop completely misses you?

My experience so far (and it is quite limited at Party/Empire) is that I can only afford to get caught 1 time in this situation before I'm then in fold or all-in mode.

Is the Party/Empire structure such that once you get to the 100/200 blind point, that if you don't have at least 3 times your starting stack that you have to push all-in just to steal the blinds and hope that you just get lucky?

Any advice, tips, strategies, insights, etc. would be greatly appreciated. I'm sure there is an obvious answer that I have just missed, but I can't really see it with the blind structure the way it is.

Thank you all that take the time to read through this and further thanks to those that reply! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]