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Sit N Go Strategy
by Steve Larson

SNG strategy is among the most clearly definable of all general strategy approaches. Make no mistake, that doesn’t mean it’s simple, it just means that there is plenty of useful information on the optimal way to do things during various stages of SNGs.

Dan Harrington’s tournament strategy system can be applied to SNGs too, with a few modifications, but enough small-talk, let’s try to pen down some actual advice. Before you get rolling: sign up for rakeback. While not all rakeback poker sites offer you rebate on your tournament fees, most of them do.

Now to actual strategy: during the early stages of a SNG, you have a large stack compared to the size of the blinds, which means that you can play optimal poker, which in this case translates to ABC TAG poker. Take tightness to a new level and try to avoid all-in situations unless you have something like K,K or A,A and you’re faced with a single opponent (or two). When there are several players all in, even such hands lose some value due to the schooling effect. Because in SNGs your stack represents your tournament life, your life-blood and only weapon in the same time, you need to go to extremes to protect it. This is why it sometimes makes sense to fold pocket rockets when confronted with 3-4 all-in guys during the early stages.

If you manage to pick some chips up along the way, you’ll reach the mid stages of the tournament on a large stack, which means that you’ll still have most of your weapons at your disposal. If you fail to do that, soon, you’ll be put in a very delicate position. Even if you do manage to chip up along the way, you’ll reach a stage in the SNG that I myself deem the most delicate one. The money bubble is still a couple of eliminations away, but the blinds have already grown to a size that’s beginning to restrict your options. At this stage, stealing blinds will make perfect sense from a purely strategic as well as from a mathematical perspective. You’ll have to steal blinds because they represent big enough additions to your stack to really matter and to insure your continued survival at the table. In the same time, due to their size compared to your stack-size, stealing blinds will make perfect sense from the perspective of the pot odds too. You know Sklansky’s theory about the pot being so big compared to the player’s stack size that going all-in would make perfect sense on almost any 2 cards? Well, this is close to that. The fact that you need to steal and re-steal blinds means that you’re going to have to ditch your conservative TAG approach and loosen up.

As a matter of fact, the entire SNG is about starting up extremely tight, and then slowly loosening up until you turn into a raving lunatic by the heads-up stage. The short handed stage is where the money bubble usually is and there you can take advantage of another phenomenon: the bubble effect which causes players to tighten up and to become willing to let go of good hands for the sake of making it past the bubble. This is where you blinds- and pot stealing antics should peak. As the other players hunker down awaiting the bubble to burst, you should be busy collecting pots which others let go easily. If you’re successful at this, you’ll arrive to the money stage of the SNG sporting a larger stack than your opponents. That should provide you with a valuable thrust on your way to the top.

“Steve Larson, an online poker player from Canada. Visit his rakeback site for more useful information. Rakemeback, the number one rakeback provider.”