Yet Another SNG Strategy Post

As you may know, I've been focusing my attention primarily on the $10 Party/Empire Sit-And-Go's... it's the only level my means or bankroll can really support at this time, and I've all but given up on the limit tables due to the high variance I've encountered at the limits I can afford. Perhaps someday I'll return to that particular piece of cyber felt, but for now I'm working on my single-table tournament game for two reasons: I'm confident I can win long term at it, and it's bound to make an enormous difference in the 1-2 table live home tournaments I'm most likely to find myself in. When you've played a couple hundred SNG's online, and you can make obvious adjustments between online and live play, you're bound to tear apart the WPT-watching fish on the home game circuit. (more on me vs live action coming soon)

The good news is, I've been playing on the same money/roll for weeks now, and overall am in the positive territory. The bad news perhaps is that I was way farther ahead at one point than I currently am. Thankfully, I'm working hard at being a "performance oriented" player, so the results part of things really isn't my focus. Sure, I'm setting a "result oriented" goal for myself (see the sidebar), because in the long run, results do provide a metric for performance. The important distinction is, you just can't use short term results as a barometer for how you are performing. (Sure you hit your two-outer on the river and won a pile of chips, which is a good result, but was it good performance... long term?) You probably get my point.

So in my quest to improve performance, I've been printing out just about every piece of SNG advice I can google up, and trying to pull it all together into a winning strategy. It really isn't as simple as, "okay, this advice sounds good, I'll stick to this and I'll win", which in some minor ways, I have to admit was my thinking. Don't get me wrong, there is some good advice out there, but I'm beginning to see that some of it might do more harm than good.

Some of it might not fit your personal style. Some of it might use superlative terms like "always" and "never" in places where "often" or "hardly ever" would be more appropriate. Some of it is only relevant to big buy-in SNG's, and some just plain sucks.

To get to the point of this post, there are two factors which I'd like to discuss, which are relevant to my SNG progress.

Table Selection

Yep, you heard me right, table selection. It would seem that you have no clue what kinds of players you're going to end up against in a SNG, or what the texture of the table is going to be like, until you're actually sitting at the table watching some hands. For the most part, this is obviously correct, but I'm beginning to notice a trend... a weak one so far, but a trend none-the-less, in how well I do at certain times of the day, on certain days of the week, and a few other factors.

I guess my somewhat weakly formed theory is this: there are times when the type of opponents you're likely to encounter will be more favorable than others. Generally, playing on the weekend, in the evening, or right after a WPT or WSOP episode on TV ends, I have found myself more often at those loose-passive tables that I can do well at. I love being able to get paid off by some level one, all-in idiot who bluffs into my flopped full house, don't you? The other side of this theory, is that on a Monday morning at 11 AM, who's likely to be playing online poker? Probably more often than not, you're going to find yourself up against a table dominated by people who have a clue what they are doing.

Obviously this varies, and you can find yourself at a "good" or "bad" table anytime, but there almost certainly has to be a trend that you could use to your advantage. I'd love to hear any thoughts on this... have you seen/observed the same thing as I have? Any particular times to avoid? Times to definitely want to play? (Of course, being able to adjust play for different table textures holds much more value than this form of "table selection".)

Starting Hand Selection in Levels 1-3

Now this is a big deal. It has probably been the biggest overall struggle I've faced in nailing down a solid SNG strategy, partly because I've read a lot of conflicting advice.

I really, really like a bit of tournament theory I read somewhere: "Start out like the rock of Gibraltar, and end like a kamikaze." That is, to put in more words, you should start a tourney very tight and or solid, taking few risks, and make gradual adjustments as things progress, until the end when you should be loose and taking many risks. Sounds good, no? There's plenty of advice out there that agrees with this concept, but interpreting this overall strategy into hand-to-hand decisions is where things get tricky. And nothing is perhaps as tricky as pre-flop play in online SNGs... what hands to play, and what hands to sit out.

Perhaps in a tournament structure where blinds increase at a moderate rate, it's probably a good strategy to sit back, watch, and wait for giant pre-flop hands to play in the early going... but I'm talking about Party/Empire SNG's here, where quickly increasing blinds make the time from start to finish, 10 players to 1, often under 45 minutes. The rules are different.

I've read SNG advice that proposed only playing AA-JJ and AKs in the first two rounds... and I've read SNG advice that said to limp with almost anything playable... suited connectors... suited one-gaps and two-gaps... Axs, Kxs, Qxs. It's difficult to say whether the former, latter, or a combination of the two is best, but I'm starting to get an idea of what works and what doesn't, and what hands to play early on.

Especially with the many poor players out there, limping with anything that can flop a monster in the early rounds is probably a good idea. I think the key is to watch your position, and make the distinction between what to play when someone has raised, and when it's been just called or folded around to you. Raised pots pre-flop in early levels (1-3) pretty much demand AA-JJ or AK for you to make a safe call. Someone raising pre-flop with AA looks a lot like an idiot raising with Q6s in the early rounds. Figure out who the fish are before attempting to reel them in.

It's mostly about implied odds in the early going. If you flop trips or better with no scare cards, or a ton of outs to the nuts (like an open-ended straight flush draw), you're likely to get paid off by the suckers holding a pair or chasing something stupid like an inside straight. I'm beginning to think that the cost of limping often in rounds 1-2, and sometimes 3, is far outweighed by the pot you'll take down if you can hit a hand or two.

The key really is knowing when to let your pre-flop limp become a post-flop fold, especially when you've caught a piece of it. You've got to read the board perfectly, know what you could be up against, and act accordingly. Flop play is where SNGs are won and lost.

The reason I'm putting so much emphasis on levels 1-3, is that there's generally a lot of chips up for grabs at this point, and if you're just sitting there waiting on huge starting hands, you're going to more often than not watch someone else take all the dead money at the table. And then you're running the risk of being a short stack, against rapidly increasing blinds and the big stacks who did take all the dead money. I'd rather take a few limping gambles early on, possibly gaining enough chips to coast into the money. If I don't get lucky with all my early limps, but get away from them cleanly, I'll probably still be left with at least 500 chips by the time I need to start worrying and looking for a hand to go all-in pre-flop with.

So it appears as if "starting like the rock of Gibraltar" might not really apply to online SNGs, at least with respect to what hands to play. A better analogy perhaps would be to start like one of those people who buy things at flea markets and thrift stores and sell them on eBay for a living: buy it for cheap, but when you find out it's worth something, sell it for a lot.