Copyright 2005 Full
Tilt Poker
March 14, 2005
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Lessons)
Poker Lesson: Sit N Goes Made
Easy
Author: 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.
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