180-man $4.40 tournies

These tournaments on Stars are nuts. I'm sure you've either heard of them or played them. A lot of "interesting" hands get showdown in these tournies, which inevitably leads to one or two people breaking away from the pack early and accumulating 10k or more chips within the first 30 minutes.

I'm assuming it is either dumb luck, or playing against people who will call you down with less than stellar hands, but for some reason I have ended up at the chip leader's table in each of the last three 180-man's that I've played.

It is starting to get annoying, because with one person having such a large chip lead over the rest of the table, it seems like we are all playing with a disadvantage. "Moves" are hard enough to pull off when the whole table is calling anyways, but when someone has 10x your stack, they just don't fold very often.

The strategy I try to use to combat the loose-calls and the large discrepancy in stack sizes is to tighten up and try to play better starting hands.

This *sounds like it should work, but when I don't see many ideal starting hands, coupled with missing the flop, my stack dwindles and dwindles as the blinds get larger and larger.

I don't really consider this "running bad" because it feels like I have been playing terrible and haven't been able to adapt to the looser, casino-type games. I haven't had much success at casinos for this very reason. I think I tighten up too much, which then leads to me not playing "my game," being very easy to read, and feeling clueless at the table.

*big sigh*

Well, I just got moved from the chip leader's table and got dealt AKo in the BB. UTG went all-in and I was the only caller. He flipped up AQ and got no help from the board. I sure hope this isn't a sign that complaining works, because I don't want to keep whining on this blog...