When talking about Sit n Go tournaments, it’s easy to get confused on the best way to play them when you compare them to multi table online poker tourneys. And by multitable tournaments I mean poker tournaments with more than 45 players. Anything below 5 tables can be considered a SnG by most standards.
In past articles we’ve talked about how to play a single or two table SnG by using a very tight form of play in the early rounds, loosening up a bit in the middle blind rounds, and using the Nash Equilibrium to either push or fold based on your reads of a player in the late rounds.
But let’s talk about the twist that you get when playing a poker online tournament that’s fairly small live. I’ve been frequenting smaller tournaments (those reserved for 2 or 3 tables) and have been trying to find a correlation on playing SnG online strategy and applying it to live games.
The midgame changes a little bit. In the midgame, you’ll want to be playing a little looser than you would be online. This is simply due to the nature of other players being more impatient than they are online since they’re not seeing as many hands. So you’ll be getting positive EV by calling with hands that have good showdown potential, and you’ll be trying to get to showdown as cheaply as possible unless you have a monster or the complete nuts.
Finally, in the late game, and this is why I titled this article the SnG twist, you’ll be tightening up again rather than using Nash to play your final hands. You see, the key to accumulating chips in a live SnG is during the middle game where the other players misunderstand the blind structure and what a viable chip stack is. You’ll see more pushes from unsuccessful players here than you will at the late game. And by the time you get to the late game, the chip stacks will be fairly high, and the player pool will be fairly low because of this. It’s not until the bubble play that you’ll loosen up again and start trying to either a) bully because you built a big stack during the mid game or b) build a viable stack if you didn’t have the opportunity to build during the mid game.
So you see, it just takes a small switch of style to successfully play a live SnG (or MTT if you consider 3 tables a MTT), and make the time you invest in each one +EV.
