Pokerstars Super-Satellite

I finally qualified in one of these a couple of days ago, finishing in the top 50 of 5000 players. It is a free game online. Once you finish in the top 50 you have a seat in a game where the top 4 get seats to the World Series of Poker. That game is a Satellite (the prize is entry into a larger tournament) hence the one I was playing in was a super-satellite, - a game to get into a game to get into a game. Not too bad considering that the first game is free and the third costs $10,000 for a seat.

One is only allowed to play this free-roll once a week. I'd like to qualify again so I have more than one shot.

I found that the strategy for this was a little different than what works in most tournaments. In most sit-n-go's or Multi-table tournaments there is usually a phase where it becomes highly effective to try to steal the blinds whenever possible, thus postponing the phase where you have less than 10 Big Blinds left in your stack and can only really go all-in pre-flop.

In this case it was nearly impossible to steal pre-flop. this is because:
1) it was free and
2) the blinds are going up every 5 minutes.
So everyone is trying to build stacks quickly, and has no fear of elimination.

An acquaintance who had been playing these with better results than I, seemed to be playing with very little bluffing. I decided that this was probably the way to go with this tournament structure. Because the fact that all bets seem to get called or raised means that:
A) You know you won't be able to steal anything anyway, and
B) You will definitely get paid off when you legitimately have something.

So in other words the value of "value-betting" goes way up and the value of bluffing goes way down. So I basically stayed in my end-game mode for most of it. I was generally pushing all in with under 10 BB, because I wasn't able to create opportunities to keep my stack much bigger than that. I got lucky and hit the flop several times, which I think is all you can really hope to do with that kind of crazy structure, if you try to create opportunities (by bluffing) you are swimming upstream.

Also I didn't get aggressive on "the bubble" as I typically would. Usually when I play a sit n go and there are 4 players left and the top 3 get paid, I like to try to start pushing people around to get enough chips to make it easier on myself to finish in 2nd or first. In this case I basically shut down when it got to under 60 players and coasted into the top 50 while the last few eliminated each other. turned out that the thing ended when it got down to 50 so it wouldn't have helped me to build up a stack on the bubble anyway.

I think that a lesson I will try to take away from this will be to observe what seems to be working for others as an indication of what should try. I should take note of:
1) are pre-flop bets getting called much in this state of the tournament, or is the first person who bets at the pot generally taking it (wide open for stealing)
B) Does a particular player close to my right seem to be doing it alot (candidate for a "re-steal" on my part)