3/23/2022
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  1. Sit N Go Red Range Rover
  2. Sit N Go Shove Ranges
  3. Sit N Go Ranges Las Vegas
  4. Sit N Go Ranges Near Me
  5. Sit N Go Ranges Karting

When there is a raise before the action gets to you at this stage, you should generally go all in or fold with the only exception of maybe calling with a few marginal hands in the big blind. Accurate Ranges For Opponents Is Key To Winning SNG Tournaments. This Article Looks At How You Can Put Your Sit N Go Opponents On Accurate Ranges. A key component in becoming a winning SNG player is the ability to accurately estimate the ranges of hands which your opponents will either push all in with at the bubble or call your all in push with. This article looks at how to put individual players on ranges.

  1. An example Sit and Go at Ignition of 9 players, 1,500 chip stacks, and starting blinds of 10/20. At the beginning of a Sit and Go, all players are usually given between 1,000-2,000 chips. The blinds begin anywhere between 5/10 and 20/40 with the exact amount depending on the site’s tournament structure.
  2. Hyper Turbo Heads-up Sit & Gos. Starting stacks: 25BB starting-stack Blind level length: 2 minutes. A good hyper turbo player will usually have an ROI that falls in the 1% to 5% range, depending on the stakes. (Players that can consistently achieve the higher end of that range usually move up fairly quickly.) Defining Features of Hyper Turbo HUSNGs.
  3. One skill that lots of beginners have trouble developing is the ability to put players on a range. In the case of sit and go’s, the most common situation where you need to put a player on a range is when they are short and are shoving all in.It’s also the most opportune time to build your stack, assuming you asses their range correctly.

How to Beat 1-Table Sit N Go Tournaments

Sit N Go Ranges

The term ‘Sit N Go’ refers to a small poker tournament with no set start time. These games start as soon as the required number of players sit down. They come in many sizes, from 2-players, all the way up to 180 over 20 tables. The most common form is a single table of 9 players.

Sit N Go tournaments require some unique strategy adjustments. You’ll still need to have the poker fundamentals in place (bet sizing, hand selection and position), with extra factors playing into your thinking.

This page gives you an overview of strategy for smaller stakes Sit N Go tournaments. The focus is on online games – though the ideas also apply to live games.

Here is what you will find in our Sit N Go strategy guide:

  • Early Stage Strategy: How to adjust when the blinds are low, and the stacks are deep.
  • Middle Stages: Stealing blinds and pots to keep accumulating chips.
  • Later Stages: As you head towards the all-important ‘bubble’ stacks get shallow, here you should revert to an all-in or fold strategy.
  • Sit N Go Bubble Math: An overview of how prize pool equity affects your strategy
  • In the Money Strategy: Further adjustments are needed when you get down to 3 and 2 players.
  • Adjusting for Different Types of Sit N Go: There are games with different speeds, table sizes and ways of distributing the prize pool
  • Adjusting for Opponents: How to play against ‘regulars’ compared to recreational type players.

Sit N Go Red Range Rover

Early Stage Sit N Go Strategy Guide

Experiences sit n go players open with fewer hands than in an equivalent buy-in multi-table tournament or cash game. Even when the blinds are low compared to your chip stack, wasting chips with speculative hands can be costly.

The early stages are a great opportunity to spot which players understand the fundamental concepts of Sit N Go strategy. Players who are loose (playing off-suit aces with small kickers or worse) will not understand the math behind these games. Players that frequently limp or call raises – only to fold when they miss the flop – are likewise not Sit N Go specialists.

When you do get big hands, play them aggressively. Your objective is to isolate bad players and win big pots with as little risk as possible. There may be opportunities to play small pairs, suited aces or suited connectors in the hope of hitting a monster flop. Make sure you do this from position and when it is cheap to get in. As you will see from the later stage strategy, chips you lose are a lot more valuable than additional chips you win at this point.

Compared to other formats, it is rarely worth defending your blinds during the early stages. If you are faced with a choice between standing up for yourself when out of position with a mediocre hand and folding, choose the fold!

Middle Stage Sit N Go Strategy Guide

As the blinds increase and a few players have busted, you need to start getting aggressive. Once again, chips you lose are more ‘expensive’ than additional chips you accumulate. If you have a premium hand, play strongly, there is little benefit to getting tricky and finding yourself in a tough spot. From the middle-stages and on you should be focused on reaching the ‘bubble’. When one or two players need to bust before the prize money spots, inexperienced players make huge mistakes. Getting there with enough chips to find folds with is the key driver of the middle stages.

With stacks of 20 big blinds, you are in a great position to steal and re-steal. If an opponent to your right opens too many pots, shoving over the top of them will often pick up cheap chips. You’ll need to defend your blinds sometimes, though a strategy of stealing them from others in position is far more effective.

During the middle stages, stacks will often be too shallow to play speculative hands like suited connectors or small pairs. High card strength alone can be plenty enough to resteal, depending on your assessment of your opponents.

Later Stage Sit N Go Strategy:

With blinds getting big, you will often find the average stack at 10 to 15x the big blind when you are down to 4 or 5 players. This is known as ‘the bubble’. When the bubble bursts, the remaining players will all be in the money. In addition to the shallow stacks, there will often be a lot of different chip stack sizes in play. If one player has a huge stack, you play differently to a bubble with 3 mid-sized stacks and one tiny one.

Your reads from the early stages on which players have Sit N Go strategy knowledge and which do not come into play here. If 2 or more opponents do not understand the dynamics of the bubble, you are in a good (though risky) position. The advantage to this is that those players can get into big pots and knock each other out – gifting you a prize money spot.

When you are playing shallow stacks, there is little room for betting over multiple streets. The standard play involves going all-in or folding. It is not the strength of your hand which dictates which hands to shove or call with – it is your ‘equity’ in the prize pool. Generally speaking, you should shove all-in a lot wider than the range of hands you call with. Against experienced opponents, you can often find spots to shove any-two. Against recreational opponents, you need to estimate the hands they will (often incorrectly) call with and adjust your own all-ins to these.

If you find yourself with a big stack, and there are 2 mid-sized stacks and a tiny stack at the table, you should often shove with any-2. Those mid-sized stacks will be very reluctant to call all-ins while someone only has 2 or 3 big blinds – and you can steal chips with impunity.

Sit N Go Shove Ranges

Bubble Math and Sit N Goes

All of the preceding strategy recommendations are driven by the math of how the prize pool is distributed. In a typical 9 player Sit N Go, the 1stplaced player gets 50% of the prize pool, with 30% and 20% for 2ndand 3rd.

Sit N Go Ranges Las Vegas

Before the bubble, with equal chip stacks, each player has 25% equity over the long run. If you call an all-in, you are risking all of your 25% equity. If you win the hand, you will not always win 1stprize. This means your equity rises, though does not double. In fact, it goes up to around 37.5%. This means you risk 25% to win an extra 12.5%.

This is the reason that you need to call all-in’s far less than you think. You don’t only need a better hand, you need a hand good enough to risk $25 to win and extra $12.50 (assuming a $100 prize pool).

As you gain experience with Sit N Goes, it is worth looking into the math of the ‘Independent Chip Model’. This covers prize pool equity decisions – and shows how you can adjust your game against players who call light.

This math shows why your core strategy is to conserve chips – additional chips you win are worth less and less as the game progresses, tilting the risk / reward ratio differently to cash game poker.

In the Money Strategy for Sit N Goes

When the bubble bursts, everyone gets a prize. Now is the chance to loosen up, and to go for the 1stprize. Stacks will be very shallow at this point – as low as 8 to 10 big blinds. There is no room for post-flop play here, with the strategy generally all-in or fold.

Equity-based strategy does still apply, though to a much smaller extent than at the bubble. You should shove liberally and call a little tighter – though not nearly as tight as you did on the bubble. Once again, the experience level and tendencies of your opponents has a large role to play.

Adjusting for Different Opponent Types in Sit N Goes

Those same players you saw limping unsuited aces and calling bets frequently in the early stages will play a lot differently than ‘regulars’ during the later stages. These types of players have little concept of prize pool equity – and will call with some terrible hands. While they might celebrate when they catch your ‘bluff’, this is a losing play long-term. The main result is to gift extra equity to the players not in the hand. Make sure that you tag or make notes on this type during the early stages. Should they make it to the later part of the game, you can adjust to their wider calling ranges.

That same type of player will typically shove all-in with a smaller range than a regular. This is a suicidal strategy, as the blinds are big and will quickly decimate your stack. Adjust by tightening up you calling range here.

Regulars who multi-table Sit N Goes will play in the opposite way at the bubble. They will not call without a top 10% (or even 5%) hand in many spots. At the same time, they will shove all-in with any 2 cards, knowing that you will not be able to call.

When facing good regulars, remember that their perception of you will be factored in. If they think you understand the math, they will shove wider. If they think you are an inexperienced amateur, they will be playing a somewhat tighter range. If you have the time, you can play with these scenarios using an ICM calculator – and re-adjust your own ranges to suit.

Adjusting for Different Types of Sit N Go

There are many new formats under the general Sit N Go category. Here are some of the popular formats:

  • Turbo: These have 5-minute blind levels, getting to the bubble a lot quicker.
  • Hyper Turbo: 2-minute blinds and shallow stacks, folding too many hands is not an option for this format.
  • Short Handed: 6-max games with 2 players getting paid is common. You will also find heads-up (2 players) and 4-max Sit N Goes.
  • Different Games: You can find PLO and Omaha hi-Lo Sit N Goes at the bigger poker rooms.
  • Double or Nothing: These are 10 handed games, with half of the field doubling their money and the other half busting out. Prize pool equity math at the bubble is an extreme version of the one covered above.
  • Bounty: In addition to a regular prize pool, you get a prize for each opponent that you knock out. This can lead to some interesting situations when a micro-stack goes all-in and others fight for the bounty.
  • Satellite Qualifier: 1-table satellites award prizes into bigger buy-in multi-table tournaments. With only one prize, the equity strategy does not apply. Here you should fight for every chip.
  • Lottery / Jackpot Sit N Goes: These are novelty games, usually 3 handed and with random prize pools of up to 10,000x your buy-in. Equity strategy does apply when more than one player gets paid – though the hyper-turbo structure means that you will not have much time to get reads.

Bryan Pellegrino has spent years building up an image as one of the most feared high-stakes heads-up sit-n-go players online.

Playing under the handle “PrimordialAA,” Pellegrino has won several hundreds of thousands of dollars beating heads-up sit-n-gos. The Lock Poker Pro has been an instructor with both PokerStrategy and CardRunners where he produced heads-up sit-n-go videos. This year, Pellegrino has decided that he is going to make a run at achieving Supernova Elite status on Pokerstars by playing heads-up hyper turbo sit-n-gos from the $200 buy-in level all the way up to the $1,000 hyper turbos.

Pellegrino isn’t just strictly an online specialist though. In 2009, at his very first World Series of Poker, he came in eighth in the $10,000 heads-up championship event. He followed this up with a deep run in the main event in 2010 and had a second-place finish in the $1,500 pot-limit hold’em event in 2012.

Card Player caught up with Pellegrino to talk about heads-up sit-n-go strategy.

Steve Schult: Let’s say somebody is transitioning to heads-up sit-n-gos from six-max or full ring sit-n-gos. What would be the biggest adjustment that player is going to have to make?

Bryan Pellegrino: Playing a lot more hands. Obviously in those other games you will be playing far fewer hands than in heads-up. In heads-up, you will be playing 70 to 100 percent of hands in position and around 60 to 80 percent of hands out of position. That means you will be put in spots with a lot of weaker hand strengths on average and also where your opponents hand strength is weaker.

It makes hand reading and adjusting a bit trickier when people have ranges that are much wider so most six-max and full-ring players have a hard time with that.

SS: So would it be easier for someone to transition to these games from heads-up cash? What are the differences in skill set between the two?

BP: Obviously, it will be much easier for a heads-up cash player. Though it depends on if they are going to move to hypers, turbos, or regular speed games before you can talk about the skill sets. Hypers require a much different skill set than the other two because you need to know how to play a much shallower stack size very well. Most cash players are really poor at that since they rarely play less than 50 big blinds deep and are usually deeper than 100 big blinds.

Turbos and regular speeds are a bit easier for them since your starting stack is 75 big blinds deep and frequency wise it plays pretty similar to 100 big blind stacks, so they are more comfortable. But everybody moving over has to adjust to playing shallow.

Less than 10 big blinds, 11-to-15, 16-to-25, 26-to-35, and 36-to-50 big blind stack sizes each have lots of different nuances. Anybody coming over will have trouble if they haven’t played those stacks frequently and will need to work on their game in those spots a lot.

SS: So what are some examples of the things you are able to do shallow stacked as opposed to a deep-stack cash game structure? How do hand values change with regards to stack depth?

BP: There are a couple different things. At around 16-to-25 big blinds a lot of people stop having a non all-in three-bet range, so they will just three-bet jam if they three-bet or they will flat otherwise. This takes away the initial raiser’s ability to flat hands to a three-bet and the more frequently the opponent does it, the more it will change the raiser’s opening range.

For instance, once you get shallower than say nine or 10 big blinds, the big blind pretty much never flat calls a min raise anymore. So now the options they have are either three-bet shove or fold their big blind. That means in our mind, hands you can’t raise/call with, like J-3 suited or 7-2 offsuit, have the same value. There are tons of interesting calculations about how you should structure ranges here against different frequencies once they have a shove or fold reaction, but the fact of the matter is that lots of people don’t take it into account, especially when they are moving over from other games.

SS: Can you talk about the importance of the button? Everybody knows position is of the utmost importance in all forms of poker, but is it more or less important in a heads-up match?

BP: In my opinion it’s much more important in heads-up sit-n-gos. With hand ranges being so wide and less polarized (meaning they either have the top of their range or a complete bluff) in a lot of spots, thin value betting becomes very important. Having the button means you have the most information and that helps a ton in being able to value bet thinly.

Sit N Go Ranges Near Me

SS: Let’s talk about your opening range on the button. How wide are you going to be raising from the button? Does your range change if you are playing a good player or a bad player?

BP: I open wide. Very wide. I open around 85 to 95 percent from the button. It doesn’t change too much against a good player or a bad player, but people’s three-bet and flatting frequencies will make me change my own a bit. Not how many hands I play necessarily, but which hands I min-raise and which hands I limp. So I don’t really start to play fewer hands, I just change how I structure each min-raise and limp range against different players.

SS: What about playing out of position from the big blind? You have stressed the importance of the button, but how wide are you defending your big blind?

BP: It depends on how wide they are opening. Good players tend to open lots of hands. Bad players don’t open that many. I am defending pretty wide though. Somewhere between 65 to 80 percent usually and it’s obviously mixed between calling, non all-in three-betting, and three-bet shoving.

SS: How do you decide whether to flat call, three-bet, or three-bet shove?

Sit N Go Ranges Karting

BP: Based on a couple of things. The wider guys are opening, the wider I’ll be three-betting. Then it kind of depends on if they call a lot, four-bet jam, or fold.
For instance, someone who never calls a three-bet and only four-bet jams or folds, I would make all of my three-bets non all-in.

However, most people do a mixture of both, so naturally you’re always jamming hands that you definitely don’t want flatted, like pocket deuces through fives and A-2 through A-6. Then you need to balance the rest between value and bluffs in both your three-bet shove and non all-in three-bet. You should have some of both in both ranges for sure.

You pretty much flat everything else that’s left and adjust based on how they play.

SS: Moving to some postflop strategy, how about your continuation betting frequencies? Since most of the time, neither player makes a hand, how often are you continuation betting flops and what types of boards are you going to bet or check back?

BP: Again, it obviously depends greatly on who you’re playing. A lot of people are the brainless kind who just like to check-raise every good hand or strong draw they have.
So for instance, on a board like 10 8 7, there are just infinite board runouts where you can just bet flop, bet turn, and jam river where they can’t call any of their range, but more balanced players are going to make it tougher to do that. They will also have a leading range so the action doesn’t just default back to you on the flop. Against those players it’s important to balance your continuation bet and check-back range and be thoughtful of how likely they are to hit the flop, check-raise, lead turns when you check back, and other factors like that.

SS: Lastly, I wanted to ask about return on investment (ROI)? What kind of ROI can you achieve in different structured games?

BP: It’s an interesting subject. In turbos, you can probably hold 5 to 7 percent at reasonable stakes, where as in hypers it’s more like 2 to 3 percent. The fact of the matter is though that the hypers have about 50 times the action that the turbos have. So when it comes down to hourly rate, most of the hyper players are killing similar stakes turbo players. That’s also why the Sharkscope leaderboard is filled with hyper turbo players.

So while you can maintain a much higher ROI at turbos and regular speed games, the hourly is almost way too low to justify it. A lot of good players play both though.

SS: Thanks for your time Bryan. Good luck chasing Supernova Elite this year.