My Articles - My Blog - Video - Poker Work - Charity - Downloads - Links - Subscribe
Advanced Sit & Go Play
Part 1: Mid-Game Strategy
Sit & Gos are a deceptively complicated form of tournament poker. In essence, they are three games in one. There is the beginning, in which you have a relatively deep stack and are trying to build up chips so that you can put pressure on your opponents later. There is the middle, where the stacks are relatively shallow and the bubble is approaching. Lastly, there is the end, after the bubble bursts and your goal is to outduel your opponent in the heads up battle and win the tournament.
First, we’ll concentrate on the mid-game, where the size of your stack often leads to awkward decisions.
M
First, we should talk about ‘M’. The term was coined by Paul Magriel and first appeared in print in Harrington on Hold’em, probably the most influential book in recent poker history. It’s a way of measuring your stack size relative to the blinds and antes.
Sit & Gos vary between sites, and you need to adjust your strategy to suit the particular structure you are playing in. It’s better to think of your stack in terms of ‘M’, rather than simply ‘x big blinds’, because if the Sit & Go you’re playing includes antes, thinking in terms of big blinds won’t provide an accurate picture of your stack position. Thinking in terms of ‘M’ will allow you to adjust to any Sit & Go structure you can imagine.
M is the ratio of your stack to the sum of the blinds and the antes. To take a couple of examples:
- If you have 1500 chips, and the blinds are 100/200, your M is 1500 / (100+200) = 5.
- If you have 4000 chips, the blinds are 100/200 with a 20 ante, and you’re playing six handed, your M is 4000 / (100 + 200 + [6 x 20]) = 9.5
You rarely need to know your M exactly – just having a rough idea will do. Your M tells you exactly how many rounds you can play at the current stakes before you will be forced all-in, and gives you a good picture of how deep your stack is relative to the blinds.
The Medium Stack Dilemma
Playing a short stack in a Sit & Go is easy (you push all-in a lot and hope to either double up, or win enough blinds to put yourself in a more comfortable position). Playing a big stack can also be easy (you bet and raise a lot to put pressure on the shorter stacks, and take marginal gambles that can pay off big). But playing a medium-sized stack, where your M is somewhere in the range of 7 to 15, can be much more difficult. Now, you have enough chips that simply pushing all your chips in preflop is often wrong, but at the same time, you don’t have enough chips to bully your opponents effectively, or profitably take marginal gambles.
Thankfully, you can avoid making lots of marginal decisions by betting cleverly. You do that by controlling the size of the pot and being the aggressor.
Controlling the Pot Size
A raise of three times the big blind is usually considered the ‘standard raise’ for a No Limit Hold’em tournament. However, you might want to deviate from it when you have a medium-sized stack, to make your decisions on the flop easier.
Your goal is to wait for a profitable opportunity, and then commit all of your chips to the pot. Simply open-raising all-in before the flop is not usually appropriate with a mid-sized stack, because if you have a good hand you won’t get called often enough to make the move profitable, and if you have a bad hand you’ll be risking too much to win a relatively small pot.
Let’s say you have 3000 chips, and raise to 600 with the blinds at 100/200 and no ante. You get one caller, the big blind, which makes the pot 1300. But you have 2400 left, so you can’t just move all-in on the flop – it would be a significant overbet. On the other hand, you can’t just check/fold either, because you’ve invested 20% of your stack in the pot. So you have a difficult decision to make – if you’ve flopped a big hand, how do you extract value from it? If you have nothing, should you make a continuation bet, and fold if you are raised?
If instead, you commit a third of your chips preflop, you are then in a position to make a pot-sized bet all-in on the flop. So, for example, you have the same 3000 chips, but this time you raise to 1000 before the flop. Now the pot is 2100 when the flop is dealt, and you have 2000 remaining. Barring a disastrous flop, you can commit yourself with a bet of 2000 without it being a significant overbet or underbet, and you’ll put your opponent in a tough spot (rather than being in that tough spot yourself).
This example is somewhat exaggerated, but you get the point. Know what you want to achieve when the flop arrives, and try to manipulate the pot size before the flop so that you can carry out your plan.
Other Preflop Considerations
Three times the big blind is the standard raise for a reason – it works most of the time. As I just explained though, you should deviate from that raise size occasionally, if doing so won’t give away your hand. A couple of other times when you should vary the size of your raise include:
- If antes are in play, you should make a bigger raise than you would if there were no antes.
- If your opponents fold to continuation bets often, you should raise more preflop, both to extract maximum value from your good hands, and to increase the size of the pots you win when you bluff successfully.
- If there is a lot of preflop limping, you should raise more preflop to reduce the pot odds your opponent receive.
- If your opponents play excessively tightly, you should consider making a smaller raise if you are not planning to commit yourself to the pot, which offers you a better risk to reward ratio.
- If a small raise gives you more fold equity than a large one (because your opponents become suspicious of larger raises and call more), you should consider raising a smaller amount.
Should you ever flat-call a raise before the flop? If you have a medium stack, almost definitely not. There are two exceptions:
- The Stop and Go: You flat call your opponent’s raise out of position, knowing that you will push all-in regardless of what the flop brings. This move is designed to give you extra fold equity and reduce your variance, because your opponent may find it difficult to call on the flop with a hand he would have called with instantly before the flop. You might try this if your opponent was overly tight.
- Setting a Trap: You flat call your opponent’s raise in position holding a strong hand like pocket aces, hoping that he will make a continuation bet after the flop that commits him to the pot. This move is designed to extract maximum value from a weaker hand that would bet the flop, but might not call your all-in reraise preflop. If your opponent is very aggressive, this can be a profitable move.
Postflop Considerations
Once the blinds start to rise, the most important part of Sit & Go strategy is how you play before the flop. If you play well, you’ll reduce or eliminate tough decisions later in the hand. By planning the hand around commitment, your flop decisions often become easy.
However two situations that warrant further attention are:
- Flopping a monster: If you flop a huge hand and it’s unlikely that your opponent has also hit, you might consider checking once, or even twice. You want to give your opponent a chance to catch a little something, and mistakenly commit himself to the pot, and to give him a chance to bluff if he is an aggressive type.
- Missing the flop: If you miss the flop, you should usually lead out with a bet – after all, you planned to commit, and you shouldn’t often chicken out at the last minute. However, sometimes it will become clear that a bluff will not succeed. Perhaps the pot is multiway and somebody has already bet, or the flop is very draw heavy and you have completely missed.
The Bubble
As the bubble approaches and the stacks get shorter relative to the blinds and antes, you can almost eliminate post flop play altogether. Once your M drops below 6, you have two moves: All-in, and fold.
When to push all-in and when to fold depends on what range of hands your opponents will call with if you raise, and what hands they will push all-in with if they open the pot before the action reaches you. There is a complex mathematical formula, known as the Independent Chip Model (ICM), which can tell you exactly what hand you need to push, or call a push. The gist of using ICM in SNGs is this:
- Based on the current stack sizes, what are the chances that each player will finish first, second, third and so on? Using this, you can assign a dollar value to each player’s stack (assuming each player is of equal skill).
- What is the equity of the player’s hand compared to the opponent’s range?
- Given that equity, what is the dollar value of the player’s stack if they a) fold and b) go all-in?
If you’re lost, don’t worry. Although ICM is just maths, it’s too complicated to do in your head while you play. The best thing you can do is to run some tournaments that you have played in the past through an ICM calculator, like Sit & Go End Game Tools (SNGEGT). Using a tool like that, you can see when you have missed out on making profitable all-in moves, and where you played correctly.
Take this hand for example. It’s four handed in a standard SNG, with the top 3 paid (50% to first, 30% to second, and 20% to third). The blinds are 200/400 with a 25 ante, and you are second in chips with 4000 (M=5.7). The UTG player (1800 chips) folds, and it’s up to you on the button. The small blind is the big stack, with 6000 chips, and is playing very tightly to make the money. The big blind is the short stack, with 1200 chips, and will call very loosely. What range of hands should you push all-in with?
You might think that because the big blind is so loose, you should wait for a fairly good hand before pushing, as you’re too likely to be called. But the correct answer is that you should push with about 38% of your hands – including any pair, any ace, almost all kings, most queens, J-8s and above and even T-9s. If you were the chipleader, you would push with even more hands – around 50% of them in fact.
Welcome to the crazy world of Sit & Gos!
Part 2: Heads Up Strategy
Whatever type of poker player you are, there’s a Sit & Go that suits you. One of the many flavours is the Heads Up Sit & Go, where you and one opponent duke it out for the prize pool mano a mano. Heads Up play represents poker in one of its purest forms – just you and your opponent on a level playing field, where the quality of your reads and your aggressiveness is more important than your cards.
Early Stage
In a nine or ten-handed Sit & Go tournament, by the time you get to the heads up stage, the blinds and antes will usually be very high in relation to the stacks (your M will be correspondingly low). This means that often, the correct strategy is for one player to open-raise all-in, and post-flop play is eliminated altogether.
This is not the case in a heads up SNG, where you’ll start with a much higher M – perhaps 50 or higher. So what adjustments do you need to make?
First of all, you should realise that very few hands are worth folding before the flop. To illustrate this, lets take an example. You have 1500 chips, and the blinds are 10/20. You are on the button and are considering limping in for 10 chips. Notice that the pot is already 30, so you’re getting 3 to 1 on your money to make the call. In heads up play, this is huge – no hand is a 3 to 1 underdog against a typical opponent’s range of hands. Bear in mind that you will also be in position after the flop – a huge advantage in heads up play.
What if you’re the big blind and your opponent raises to 60? Well, now there will be 80 in the pot, and you’ll need to call 40 – 2 to 1 odds. That’s also excellent, and it seems clear that you should be willing to call such a raise with a wide range of hands, particularly if your opponent is loose.
To sum up then, you should be very willing to enter the pot in general. You should limp in with almost any hand, folding only those with high reverse implied odds (i.e. hands that will be difficult to extract value from, but may cost you a lot – such as 8-3 offsuit, 9-2 offsuit, etc). You can fold more hands if you’re the big blind and your opponent raises, but only a few more.
Should you limp in or raise if you’re the button? Well, that depends on what you want to accomplish and how your opponent plays. Winning the blinds is less important at this stage of a tournament than it is later on, but if you want to build a pot with a good hand (and your opponent correctly doesn’t fold much preflop), then raise often. If your opponent plays too tightly after the flop, raise to make the pot big early and increase your potential earnings when you bluff or crack his big hands. However, you might find it suits you better to simply limp in with most of your hands and outplay your opponent after the flop.
During the early stage, you can ‘feel out’ your opponent without it costing you too much. You want to know whether they are aggressive or passive, tight or loose. If they are loose and aggressive, then you need to call their bets more to punish them for bluffing. If they are tight and passive, then you can bluff more often. If they are loose and passive, then you can take more free cards in the hope of hitting a big hand, and bluff less.
Be aware of the image you are creating for yourself in the early stages. If your opponent is folding a lot of hands, but you are limping or raising every single time, he probably thinks you are a loose player. Likewise, if you’re unlucky enough to be dealt complete trash hands a lot in the early stages and have to fold, he may think you’re tight and that he can bully you. Bear this in mind for the later stages.
Middle Stage
The first level or two of a heads up SNG, barring any huge confrontations between big hands, will probably not involve many large pots (relative to the stacks). However, once the blinds and antes have increased to the point where your M is in the 7-20 range, losing a pot can seriously hurt your chances of winning the tournament.
All of a sudden, winning the blinds becomes important. You should therefore be raising from the button much more often than before, since every successful steal allows you more time to find the right hand to take on your opponent. If you don’t win enough blinds, you can easily find yourself forced into a position where you are all-in with a very weak hand and your tournament life is on the line.
If you are the big blind, you must be prepared to put in reraises with hands that might not usually warrant it if you feel your opponent could be stealing the blinds. A hand like K-Qs, or 4-4 for example, is an easy reraise against an aggressive opponent. Unless you’re planning a stop & go or post-flop slowplay, you should rarely consider flat-calling a raise in this situation – the equity you gain when your opponent folds is more significant than you may realise.
As with a full ring Sit & Go, you will do better in this stage if you plan in advance. Know what you want to achieve on the flop, and manipulate the preflop betting so that you can do so. For example, if you want to commit all your chips, but your stack is too deep to simply move all-in before the flop, try to manipulate the betting so that the pot size on the flop is big enough for you to go all-in without overbetting significantly. If your hand is likely to flop a draw, try to either keep the pot small (so that your opponent can’t easily bet you off the hand if he is aggressive) or make it very large (so that a semi-bluff is a highly profitable play if he is tight).
Know that hands change value significantly when heads-up. It’s not uncommon for hands to be won by ace-high, bottom pair, and so on. Be prepared to make calls on the river with some very marginal hands, and also to bet hands for value that you would normally check.
End Game
At the end of both Heads Up SNGs and full ring SNGs, there will come a point where the stacks are short relative to the blinds and antes (your M is less than 7) and the correct move is almost always to simply push all-in or fold.
About 50% of the time, you’ll be dealt the best hand. The other 50% of the time, you’ll be dealt the worst hand (I am ignoring ties for convenience here). It should seem logical then, that you should be willing to push all-in when first to act at least 50% of the time, even if your opponent would call every time.
In actual fact, if your opponent will call with any two cards and has approximately the same number of chips as you, you should push all-in with about the top two-thirds of hands (exactly how many depends on how deep the stacks are). The tighter your opponent becomes, the more hands you should push all-in with, because the equity that you gain when they fold is extremely valuable.
If you have the chip lead, you should push all-in even more often, because even if you lose the pot when called, you will still be in the tournament with a chance to win.
But what about if your opponent is the one doing the pushing? Well, it logically follows that if your opponent is pushing with a certain range of hands, you should call when your hand figures to beat that range. So if your opponent is pushing 100% of the time, you should only fold your very worst hands. It also logically follows that if your opponent is correct push all-in more often if you are tight, you hurt him by loosening up and calling more. In fact, the more often your opponent pushes, the more often you should call, full stop.
It’s obvious that the person who is first to push is at a significant advantage here. It’s safe to say that you should never fail to take advantage of that opportunity by just calling. Fold or raise – half measures just don’t cut it anymore.
There is a lot of luck at this stage of a SNG, and it’s easy to see why they are criticised as ‘crapshoots’ by some players. But if you can learn when to see flops in the early stages, when to steal and resteal in the middle, and when to push and when to call at the end, you’ll get more than your fair share of the money.
