Sit N Goes Made Easy
Pro Poker Tips -
Howard Lederer
The Sit N Go (SNG) is online poker's
great gift to the aspiring tournament player. Prior to the SNG, final
table experience was hard to come by. You could enter a dozen
multi-table tournaments and never find yourself at a final table. Or
you could make one or two, only to get knocked out in 8th or 9th
place. Adapting to an ever-diminishing number of players at a single
table is a crucial skill in tournament poker, and it's a hard
experience to find offline without investing a lot of time and money.
Online, this experience is a mouse-click away. The SNG's advantages
are many. For starters, it's low-cost, or even free. It's also fun,
and convenient: You don't need to schedule it -- a SNG starts every
time the table fills up -- and it's usually over in less than an hour.
It is the flight simulator of Final Table play, and mastering it
should be considered mandatory homework for the serious student.
Now that you know why you should play, let's look at how:
The most obvious difference between a SNG and a multi-table tournament
is that when someone goes broke in a SNG, there isn't someone waiting
to fill their spot. Multi-table play consists mostly of full-table,
ring game poker. But as players get eliminated from a SNG, the table
gets shorter- and shorter-handed. This reduction in players basically
serves to artificially raise the antes. For instance, say you are
playing five-handed and the blinds are 100-200: You are paying 300 in
blinds for every five hands, or 60 per hand. As soon as someone gets
knocked out, you're four-handed. Now you're paying 75 per hand -- a
25% increase -- despite the fact that the blinds have remained the
same. Accordingly, you're forced to gamble more, or risk getting
blinded out.
Since the size of the blinds relative to your stack size should always
play a major role in you hand selection, I recommend starting out with
pretty conservative starting hand requirements. This serves two
functions: First, the blinds dictate that you play fairly tight early;
the blinds are small and you are nine-handed, so they don't come
around as often. Second, this helps you establish a tight image, which
you hope will pay off later when the blinds are high and you might
really need a timely ante steal.
But there is another not-so-obvious reason to play tighter earlier and
looser later: The payout structure rewards tight play. Most SNG's pay
50% to first, 30% to second, and 20% to third. This payout structure
dictates that you play for third. Why? Looking at the payout structure
another way might help. Basically, the payout means that 60% gets
awarded once you are down to three players, 20% gets awarded when you
get down to two players, and the final 20% gets awarded to the winner.
If you can just get to third, you get at least one-third of 60% of the
prize pool, or 20%. You've locked up a profit, and you have a chance
to win up to 30% more. It's only now that you're in the top three that
your strategy should take an abrupt turn. Now it pays to gamble for
the win. Let's look at the numbers again: 60% of the prize pool is off
the table, and moving up one spot is worth only another 10%. But move
up just one more spot and it's worth a whopping 30% extra -- that's
three times more for first than it is for second. And with the blinds
going up, gambling for the win is even more clearly the correct play.
I see many players employ a nearly opposite strategy. They figure they
have nothing to lose, so they go for the quick double-up early. They
take chances too soon when, in their view, there's "nothing on the
line". Then, once they're in the money, they tighten up, thinking
about that extra payout for moving up a spot. If you start to rethink
your SNG approach and adopt a "slow early, fast late" strategy, you
will see an almost immediate improvement in your results.
Best of luck and see you at the tables,
Howard Lederer
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