Jul 22 2008
A Quick Overview Of Online Poker SNG Tournaments
Sit N Go poker tournaments are a unique animal. When the blinds are small you want try to avoid a big pot unless you have a big hand and are willing to risk your tourney. An example is a hand like 99. If you don’t hit a set you have to be ready to get away. These are dangerous hands to raise (or even get involved in) from early position early in a SNG.
In SNG’s a lot of players waste too many chips early with hands like small pocket pairs. However, these can be raised and make big profits in cash games. The way a single table event works, makes it better to play these hands in small preflop pots. You seldomly will hit your set post flop and it won’t cost you too many chips.
As the blinds get big in relation to your stack, you need to play aggressively. Whenever you can, you must try to steal the blinds. These tourneys become a game of chicken, steals, and resteals. If you don’t get involved, you will find yourself with too small of a stack. You might get called and knocked out even when you finally get a good starting hand.
As the blinds get large, or are are big relative to your own stack, you need to consider going all in. If you think it might work out better to raise, that is fine providing you are going to push all in post flop. You have to be willing to risk it all to give yourself a chance to win.
If you know your opponent is tight, you can push more often, because you will get enough folds. Your opponents stack size is a factor here also. If he has a big stack and can afford it, he will make more calls. The middle stacks want to protect their chips more and can be “trusted” to fold often.
When you’re on the bubble, your play is determined a lot by stack sizes. For example, you might push all in to try to knock out a short stack. You could fold the same hand pre-flop to the big stack to save chips also. Naturally, you would have to fold to a big raise.
In this situation, you’re usually looking to push all in, but you cards aren’t the only factor. Often you will want to go all in with any hand, if your stack threatens everyone enough. If someone your betting at has a lot of chips, he will call you more often, so you need better cards.
When you have a big stack late in the tournament, you should be stealing the blinds often. This is best done against the medium stacks. They will feel it’s too expensive to play against you and risk getting knocked out.
The problem here is you want to get to the money before losing your stack. The monster stack will knock you out, while the shorties will gamble with anything to survive. This is not an easy place to be in.
This involves learning which move is better in different situations. Do you go all in or forld? One part of the formula is predicting what your opponents will call you with. When that decision is made, it’s push or wait.
Equity value (EV) is the value of your hand when you push all of your chips in. EV helps determine which hands to play. Once you decide what that range is, then it is either better to put all your chips in or fold.
