Every year, the business students society of my university holds a "poker night"; a pub pokeresque SNG. The primary function of the night is "corporate networking", with past students and business representatives coming to the night.

The tournament is a $30NL SNG. Levels are 15 mins. first level 100/200 with starting stacks of 42,000. Pay structures are a little weird: Top 15 get $20 dollar gift vouchers. 2nd place gets $250 and 1st place is shipped a $1.5k iPad pro!!!(donated by one of the event sponsors).

The field: generally around 50-70 players. roughly 20% of the field have never played before. 50% have only ever played this event annually. 30% play on Zynga. It may also be important to note that all tables have decent dealers that can probably deal at a standard live casino rate.

The last year I played it, I ran pretty hot, as well as getting value from some pretty ludicrous hands. e.g. second pair stacked off 80BB on a 4 card flush board, when i had nuts. But lost my whole stack getting trapped by a Zynga wizard who limped UTG. hero w/ JJ raises 6X. UTG 3bets 5X pot. hero ships for remaining 3/4 stack and gets snapped off by KK.

How should I adjust to this field and take advantages of early deepstacks?

How do YOU think you should adjust?
Give us your thoughts...

If the blinds double every time, imo it pay dividends to take a small ball approach early and try and build a stack early. This is because you go from being very deep-stacked and comfortable, to being short-stacked and desperate. Inevitably it will turn into a average stack of 10-15bb's where it'll devolve into shove, shove, shove. If it is a slow structure, you can play tighter and ABC and probably be good. In general focus on valuebetting more and bluffing a lot less. If your table gets 4-7-handed open your range up, most live players (even semi-competent ones) play their full-ring style no matter how many people are at the table.

Good tells and player traits to look for:
Who plays their draws aggressively?
Which players will call w/ 2nd or bottom pair looking to spike 2pair and how do they play it on the river.
Who overplays their hands like JJ and AK

Also, this is extremely general, but players who call in the blinds and then raise a cbet on the flop almost always have 2pair (I swear on this for LLSNL)

Also, Zynga Wizards limp/raising is the stone cold nuts like 99% of the time

The most obvious + EV thing to do here is actually network and not try to appear super serious while playing.

The 15 min levels are designed for a social event and the only reason stacks are so deep is so people don't feel cheated out of $30 because they only got to play an hour of poker.

You'll be able to exercise the most skill in the lower levels so I would push small edges there and try to build your stack.

Once the decisions become push/fold I'll bet you'll be able to exercise some more skill there as I'm willing to bet people will be folding much too often.

+1 the ev of networking and making connections is much higher than the $ value of said prizes. That being said, you should still try and win... just do it in a manner that is friendly. Trying joking around all the time while youre crushing.

Yea +1 to this too. You should try to win if you're going to play but definitely try to be personable doing it, especially in between hands.