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ONLINE POKER: Improving Your Sit n’ Go Play

go back to the Single Table Tournaments - part I

What if instead of being the big stack you are the short stack?  Your actions will depend a lot on how short you are.  You should never let yourself get below 4-5 big blinds.  If you find yourself with 4-5 big blinds left you should be moving in almost every single time that you are first to act or it is folded to you.  If there is another opponent that is shorter or similarly short stacked then this can influence your play to some degree and may make moving in wrong.  It will depend on who will have to take the blinds first and how much gambling your opponent is doing.  If you have a short stack then finishing 3rd is a great result and optimal play will take that into account. 

Okay so we have covered big stack play and short stack play, what about when you have a medium stack? This is the trickiest stack size to play because you have to balance two different goals, the goal of accumulating chips and winning the tournament, and the goal of ensuring a payday and cashing in the tournament.  Most players are too cautious in this situation, and although they may cash often, their overall results suffer.  You want to try to at the least maintain your stack size by making aggressive plays in position.  What you do not want to do is call off all of your chips with less than a monster hand.  This is key in all stages of a STT.  Look for spots where you can be the first one to enter the pot and where another medium stack is in the big blind.  Big stacks have the extra chips to call you easily and short stacks will know that they need to gamble and will forced to call you more liberally.  Attacking the medium stacks will give you the greatest chance of winning the blinds without a fight, which is exactly what you will want to do. 

The End Stage

Once the bubble bursts and play is three handed there is once again a change in strategy.  There is no longer a big jump in prize money when one more player is eliminated.  At this point you have one goal and that is to win the tournament.  The best way to do so is to have the most chips when you reach heads up.  Many players are just happy to be in the money and become much more likely to call off their chips with a mediocre hand.  This is not the way to gather chips to go for the win.  You want to continue moving all-in when you can be the first player to enter the pot so that you can have the best chance at accumulating chips without a showdown.  At this stage in the tournament you are going to be forced to turn your hand over at times but you still want to be first in the pot and force your opponents to call.  If you can pick up enough pots this way you will have a cushion in the pots where you get called, and hopefully you will be able to survive a loss.

Once you get to heads up play, the correct course of action will depend on how well your opponent adjusts to heads up play.  If your opponent fails to adjust and folds a lot on the button and otherwise allows you to chip away at his stack then you will play largely the same strategy.  Try not to call off all of your chips without a very solid holding.  Keep moving in when you have the button and try to chip away at him until he will have to win a number of pots to get back into contention.  If however, your opponent is playing a better strategy, you will have to be more willing to make some marginal calls.  You can’t just keep allowing each other to steal the blinds until one of you is lucky enough to pick up a great hand in the big blind.  Hands that contain and Ace and medium pairs go up in value in these situations.  Hands like small pairs become more suspect, as you will almost certainly be in a race situation or way behind.  The blinds are usually so high at this stage of the tournament that there is a lot of luck involved and the only way you can really combat this luck is to have more chips when the heads up begins.

Independent Chip Model

STT’s are essentially one long math problem.  No other form of poker is as similar to a math equation and no other form of poker has such clearly right and wrong courses of action.  Most players do not treat STT’s like this and that is one of the major reasons that these tournaments are so profitable.

One way that top STT players figure out the correct course of action is by using the Independent Chip Model (ICM).  Essentially what the ICM does is tell your expected return in certain situations, depending on what action you take and how many chips you are left with.  The math can be complicated and is way too complex to be done at the table.  The best thing to do is to work out common situations beforehand, and also take notes of difficult situation that come up while you are playing so that you can work them out after the tournament is over.  Essentially you work out the possible outcomes if you fold or if you raise and then, using ICM, you can figure out which option is the best for the situation at hand.  There are a number of ICM calculators that are available free online that will make the calculations much easier to do.

This is too complicated for many players to bother with and it is possible to be quite good at STT’s without using ICM, s long as you develop a good feel for how different options affect your overall chances of winning.  Familiarize yourself with how moving all-in with different hands affects your overall chances and you will have a leg up on your opponents.

Fold Equity and The Gap Concept

Fold Equity is simply the possibility that your opponents will fold and the value that you gain from these potential folds.  Many times when your hand is likely to have significantly less value in terms of pot equity if you were called it can still be a positive expected value play to raise all-in because of the chance that your opponent will fold.  This is a key concept in STT’s as it will be a major factor in many of the raises you make.  If you happen to get called you will often be a considerable underdog but you will still be moving all-in because your opponents will be forced to fold enough that moving all-in still has an overall positive expected value.

Another concept that is very important when playing STT’s is The Gap Concept.  This concept was first explained in David Sklansky’s book Tournament Poker for Advanced Players.  Sklansky was referring to how The Gap Concept applied to multi table tournaments but it is even more applicable in STT’s,  The Gap Concept says that you need a stronger hand to call a raise then you do to make a raise in the first place.  This is a very important concept when playing STT’s.  If you are playing correctly you will be raising with a lot of mediocre hands based on the situation, not the hands value.  These same sort of hands, and even hands that are significantly stronger than them, would be quickly folded if someone else had raised before you.  Nowhere is this more true than in STT’s where many of your chips will be won pre-flop when everyone folds.

Conclusion

STT poker can be a lot of fun and very profitable if you understand a few concepts and strategies.  No other form of poker is more like a math equation and there is likely no other form of poker that your cards have less an impact in your end results than in STT play.  Much more important than playing your cards correctly is playing your situations correctly, and much of what is correct is counter-intuitive to many people.  Use the Independent Chip Model away from the table to begin to understand what the correct course of action is and implement your results in your strategy.  Most players do not move all-in nearly enough when they are short stacked, and most players call way too many all-ins from their opponents.  Keep concepts like fold equity and The Gap Concept in your mind while playing to avoid making these mistakes.  Be attentive when you reach the bubble, and pay close attention to how your chip stack compares to the blinds and to your opponents chip stacks.  If you can incorporate all of these concepts and ideas into your play there is a good chance that your results and bottom line will improve dramatically.