How to elevate from second to first?
I am a perennial second placer in our NL hold 'em tourneys (usually 8-12 people). I almost always play tight enough to make it to heads up play, and then I get smacked around by the big stack. This has happened so often that I'm trying to vary my play to get over the hump. I want to win at least one tournament, maybe that would be enough to start having a shot at the subsequent ones, but I'll never know until I get there.
I started out a very tight player: go in heavy when I have the nuts (or close to it), otherwise fold fold fold. I never chased anything unless it was free, rarely bluffed, only semi-bluffed against one other opponent who seemed completely weak, and so forth. It's good for 2nd place (which for us is in the money) but it always left me high and dry against a big stack at the end.
Sat. night was our most recent tourney and I varied my play, sometimes aggressively. I widened my range of starting hands, limping in with almost anything if it was cheap and raising from the button or late positions if the situation called for it, almost regardless of my hands. Early on it served me well. After a few hours it was me and two other guys with slightly larger piles, and I decided to make a move to ensure that I was either the biggest stack, or out. I basically bluffed (not even a semi-bluff) on three hands in two rounds. The first one I won outright after a weird flop, and got healthy on it. The second one I got called and then bet into after the flop, so I folded it and didn't lose much. The third one - and by the way, this is indicative of the hands I was getting, that I was making most of my money bluffing - I limped in and we traded bets until the river. On the river he checked and I knew had made nothing better than high pair, probably less. I bet huge, most of my stack. Fairly obvious scare move, but then he knew he had nothing and that I might have almost any other nothing (a higher pair, maybe middle two pair).
What happened was, he called, took most of my stack, and I bled out from there. (In retrospect, if the same situation came up again, I might bet smaller, see if he raises on the sniff-out, and then re-raise to make him think harder. I feel like a sucker for betting so hard on a bluff.) This same guy has beat me four or five times lately. He's elevated to be the best player in our game. What's killing me is not his cards but his instincts: he just has a sixth sense for when to call and when to fold. I know tells and try to disguise mine as much as possible, but he sniffs me out often enough that I get burned anyway.
(Sorry for the diatribe.) The question is, how do I get past this guy and win these tournaments? He's an aggressive but strategic player who reads other players uncommonly well. He almost always gets the big stack early and never relinquishes it. I can get to heads-up with him but any hint of weakness in my bets and he jumps all over me. I feel like my cards are often pretty poor, but I'm sure most players feel that way. Frankly I know that he's outplaying me on one to three key hands per night, and that's what is killing me. But these things don't go long enough for me to wait for the nuts and then try to sucker him in. I'd probably need a 12 hour tournament to ever rope this guy in that way.
