How To Win Money Playing Sit & Go Poker

Although high-stakes cash-games and million-dollar tournaments dominate the poker headlines, it is another poker format that is often the first stop for still-developing players who are looking to have some fun at the tables while developing the skills necessary to sustain a profitable online poker career: Sit & Go Tournaments.

Known by a plethora of related terms – SNG, sitngo, sit n go, sit and go – this type of poker game is focused on shorter time-frames, fewer opponents, and top-heavy payouts. The original format took form in the shape of a 9 or 10-handed poker tournament beginning with 1000-1500 chips where a typical payout structure would see the winner take 50% of the prize-pool (all entry fees minus the rake or ‘juice’) with second place winning 30% and third place taking the remaining 20%. Today near infinite variants exist – from No Limit Holdem SNGs to Pot Limit Omaha SNGs, from heads-up SNG quick-hitters to 180-player multi-table sit and go tournaments.

But how exactly do sit and go tournaments work? And are Sit and Gos profitable for the average player? Can you actually make more money playing Sit and Gos than playing regular cash tables or tournaments? And if so, what sit and go variation is best? Let’s take a few moments to explore these questions and others while weighing the pros and cons of playing SNG tournaments.

Unlike in cash-games, the vast majority of poker SNGs offer a single entry with no rebuy option. This can be a benefit for inexperienced players who still struggle with tilt-control issues as it prevents them from reloading their stack after a bad beat and immediately dump that one as well chasing their losses. And although there’s nothing stopping the same player from firing up another sit and go, the way in which these tournament types are structured – namely requiring a full table to begin and making the early levels somewhat inconsequential to the final results – provide players with enough time to regain their composure and return to the basics of optimal SNG strategy rather than piling stack after stack into the middle of the table.

For those players who enjoy the tournament structure but don’t have the time to sit through a multiple-hour (or even multiple-day) event, SNGs are a perfect alternative. Depending on the specific format, some sit and go tournaments can last no more than a couple of minutes, with even the largest of them generally lasting only 2-3 hours, a far cry from the standard 7-8 hour+ timeline for full-sized tournaments. In fact, when playing the heads-up sit & go or hyper-turbo sit & go variants, players can get a whole bunch of games in even just over their lunch-break or a similar time-frame, something that would be impossible with tournaments and likely inadvisable in cash-games where building reads on your opponents’ factors into strategy much more heavily.

Without a doubt the poker variant with the weakest competition at the lower limits, poker SNGs are often the first stop for inexperienced players getting used to the online poker game. Additionally, many tournament and cash-game players like to splash around in the SNG games when short on time as well as following their regular sessions, which can be a benefit to experienced SNG players who have developed this highly specific skill-set. Because while certain poker characteristics transfer well from cash-games and tournaments, many others require a unique understanding of very specific SNG principles such as ICM considerations and late-game strategies.

This might seem counter-intuitive as one would expect edges to be largest in deep-stack poker scenarios, but when it comes to weaker players still developing their poker strategies, fast structures can be beneficial as they actually reduce the edge experienced players have over their opponents. Additionally, by focusing on building specific strategies for the faster structures found in online SNGs, astute players can use the fast structure to their advantage by exploiting tactical weaknesses of players not familiar with the format.

Conversely, for strong poker players with a solid grasp of poker strategy fundamentals, the fast SNG structure may work to reduce their overall edge as they’ll have fewer opportunities to exact that edge (which is why SNG ROIs trend downward the faster the structure goes). However, as discussed above, skilled players can minimize the impact of this factor by focusing on growing their understanding of SNG-specific strategies that will provide them with an increased edge over any player who hasn’t done so as well.

Unlike full-sized tournaments where the top prizes can be hundreds of times the size of a player’s buy-in amount, unless one is specifically playing the Jackpot variation, the upside is much more capped in SNG play. For example, in a typical 10-handed SNG, the average prize for 1st place will generally be about 5 buy-ins, with 2nd place winning 3 buy-ins and 3rd place winning the rest. This means that individuals looking to play poker for the rush of the big win may not be well suited for the slow and steady grind of SNG play.

Although SNG variance is some of the lowest in the game of poker over a significant sample size, when it comes to each individual game, it can often be one of the highest. That’s because with so few chips in play and such little time to exact one’s edge, players are often forced to take risks and “coin-flips” they might otherwise pass up if they were, for example, playing a multi-day tournament or deep-stacked cash game. As such players will usually need to win much more than their ‘fair share’ of close calls in order to survive any given game.

Of course, the strategy of how to win at sit & go poker depends on many factors including variant, size, speed, skill-level, and buy-in. Still, there are a number of near-universal factors to consider when competing in poker SNGs that will undoubtedly improve your bottom-line and help you win more money at the poker table.

The first step in developing a profitable sit and go strategy is building a deep understanding of the specific variety. How many players are involved? How many big-blinds does each player begin the tournament with? How fast do the blinds increase? How many players get paid in the end? How is the prize-pool divided amongst the winners?

These are all important (factors) not only to consider, but to think about from a deeply strategic standpoint. For example, if the prize-pool awards one buy-in to the 6th place finisher but 15 buy-ins to 1st place, the bubble should be looked upon as an opportunity to attack relentlessly so as to set oneself up for the more meaningful stage of the sit and go.

Speaking of SNG stages, new players would be wise to break down their strategic approach in thirds – early-game, mid-game, and late-game. Although it, once again, depends on the specific format of the game, generally speaking, the right approach in the early stage of a SNG is to play a pretty straight-forward ABC type of game, being aggressive with the good hands and not sacrificing too many chips prospecting on speculative hands or pots. In the middle-stage, as the blinds increase – often substantially so – and the bubble approaches, experienced players often like to loosen up their game and attack those who they perceive to be on the weaker end of the poker-playing spectrum using the reads they’ve built throughout the early portion of the tournament.

Finally, the late-game stage arrives with the bursting of the bubble and lasts until a winner is crowned. More than in any other stage, reads on the other players at the table will dictate one’s late-game SNG strategy. If playing against loose-aggressive opponents who will immediately begin flinging chips into the middle once they’re in the money, a tighter approach as the raiser and looser approach as the caller will often be right, while the opposite will be true against tighter opponents trying to ladder up the payouts.

As alluded to above, one of the biggest factors to making money in sit & go poker is understanding the delicate dance of patience and aggression. Although it can be fun to keep one’s foot on the proverbial gas-pedal from the outset of a tournament, more often than not that’s not going to be a profitable long-term strategy. It is the player who can get a feel for each of their tables and seamlessly transition between patience and aggression depending on the opponents and stage of the tournament that will put themselves in the best position to make a profit playing sit & go poker.