A group of my friends and I have a weekly homegame tournament. It’s small stakes with $10 buy-ins and re-buys for the first hour (two levels). Lately I’ve been trying the Daniel Negreanu approach to re-buys by pushing all-in often and with any range of hands with the hope of either getting a very large stack or flooding the table with chips in order to win them back later. Each time things worked well for a while (i.e., I re-bought five times and then managed to triple-up), before crashing and leaving me walk home in shame.

Last night I had built my chip stack up to 4,000 from the starting stack of 1,500. During the third hand of the third level (no more re-buys) I found myself with pocket kings in the big blind. It folded through to C.F, who was third to act and raised the pot to 220 (blinds were at 30/60). C.F. typically limps with weak hands and raises with strong ones, so I put him on AK, AQ, JJ, QQ, AA. The dealer called and I called making the pot three-handed.

The flop was a beautiful 9, J, K. C.F. bet 1,000 into the pot. The pot only had 690 in it to begin with. I certainly didn’t put him on 10, Q, as it’s not a hand he would raise pre-flop with (especially in third position). The dealer folded and I thought a minute before announcing a raise. Before I said how much I wanted to raise, C.F.said he was all-in (we had similar sized stacks). I was confident I had the nuts and assumed he had a worse set, AK, or AA. I called and he turned over his aces. The turn was a 3 and the river was an ace, giving C.F. a higher set.

Of course, I can’t fault C.F. for pushing with his aces. His all-in wasn’t even a min-raise had I opted to min-raise, which I wouldn’t have. Had I raised to 2,500, his all in would only be a few hundred more. Where I am going with this is to the question of whether this tactic is something I should be pursuing. When you lose, it’s expensive, and when you win, you only manage to get just ahead of your loses from previous weeks.

Thoughts?