Advanced sit and go strategy – Part one

When playing Sit and Go tournaments you will witness both some of the best poker that you have seen played and the worse poker you have seen, with the player ability levels having no impact on if they can enter into the tournament.

Sit and Go tournaments offer a good return on your buy in, if a player was looking to participate in one of these tournaments, with the smaller scale 6 player tournaments paying out the top 2 finishing places with the price pool split 60/40.

Enjoy the first part of advanced sit and go strategy here at Poker Rakeback Online. 
When you enter into a tournament situation like this playing tight poker within the early stages is always the best form of attack, giving the bad player the room to make their errors and you the opportunity to capitalise on their mistakes.

With blinds starting at their lowest point at the beginning of the tournament, you can afford to sit tight and pick your hands carefully, letting hands like king / seven off suit pass by happily knowing that even if you were in a blind position, that you aren’t losing an amount of chips that is not going to make your tournament life a little bit more tighter or leave you as a massive short stake.

Carefully selecting your hands at this stage infact offers you the strongest starting point that you could wish for.

From real experience I have seen that a huge amount of players who enter into sit and go tournaments seem to think that they should set the blinds that little bit higher.
I mean we have all been sat at a sit and go tournament table, only to see that the guy who was last to the table is throwing a raise of 120 into a pot of 30 chips, he gets a call and then after the flop he makes another oversized bet only to be pushed all in and turn over his two / three suited.

If you haven’t seen this been done then you either haven’t played a sit and go tournament since joining the online poker craze or you have been that busy planning your move and how the odds stack up in your favour is you call…

Trust me, it happens…. Frequently.

Ok well i’ve told you that you should be playing tight at the early stages but what does playing tight involve?

Play tight poker means that you are selecting just the strong starter hands in poker to play, also know as ‘premium’ hands.

Once you are dealt a strong premium hand pre flop, its time to make your move.
Deciding how you would approach this should be decided through your concepts that you have taken from the game played so far.

You aim is to place a bet into the pot that is large enough to scare your opponents out of the hand.

So if you have been waiting a number of hands for your power hand to be dealt and there has been a player who has been making oversized bets for a number of hands, knocking this player out of the hand pre flop is going to be harder when only placing three or four times the big blind into pot.

A situation like this would mean that the best course of action would be to place a bet that is either five or six times the big blind, meaning that even if he’s going to call your raise it will make it worth your while.

With this been said, if that player then re-raises your bet, its time to consider your hands strength and to assess, the best you can, if the player that you are up against actually could be holding a better hand than you are holding.

Its always advisable to avoid pre flop all in calls within the early stages of a sit and go tournament, unless you are holding either a pair of aces or a pair of kings.

A pair of queens in this situation is a tough call for a number of players, with them feeling that with the hand been considered as a strong hand but this frame of mind clouds their judgement surrounding the hand, forgetting that many players see ace / jack as a strong hand.

Entering into a hand pre flop with these hands would leave you with the odds in your favour but they you are also left wide open to an ace falling in the community cards, ultimately undoing your hand right before your very eyes.

Seeing this happen if likely to deal you a crushing blow to your confidence, leaving you unfocused and on tilt.

Another hand to be very wary of pre flop is ace / king, both suited and unsuited.

Placing a high level bet into the pot pre flop is advised but making sure that the amount is not going to leave you with more chips in the pot than in front of you is equally as important.

When entering into a pot with this hand, although the common misconception is that the hand is as powerful as any of the premium hands, but in reality the hand don’t possess the strength that many people credit the hand with.

Once a flop is entered with this hand, a player has to be able to walk away from the hand if the flop presents no pair and a rival player makes a bet into the pot.

I have seen so many players exit from tournaments due to their inability to walk away from this hand, even capitalising on this a large number of times.

Ok well to recap over what I have outlined within the strategy of early stage sit and go tournaments, you have to select your hands carefully, waiting for your premium hands and allowing the blinds to pass by on any hand other than a high pair in the pocket.

Ok so now to focus on how you should play the middle stage of a sit and go tournament.

Firstly I think i should define how I have entitled this part of the tournament as the ‘middle’ sector.

I refer to the middle sector or section of a sit and go tournament as been any round that occurs after the first four blind increases.

Within the early stages of the tournament, the weaker players are often eliminated in this stage due to them either playing the wrong hands or makingover sized bets into pots that they have misread.

In the middle stages of a sit and go tournament the blinds will begin to hurt chip stakes alot more than the earlier stages of the tournament did, meaning that players who have reached this stage have to flip their playing style from tight to aggressive.

Playing your middle stage in an aggressive manner means that you have the opportunity to build up a chip stack that will last the test of time, with blinds increasing higher and higher.

The middle sector of the tournament and the aggressive change in tournament stance should open your style up to making calculated bluffs into pots that are there for the steal.

I say that it should open your style up to ‘calculated’ bluffs as placing your chips into a pot when you have not considered what the opponents could be holding, is a very risky move and one that should not be attempted.

When you are as sure as you can be that your opponents are holding either a high card combination or a low pair, placing a bet of just under the current pot should scare them out of the pot, leaving you to take the winnings on a bluff.

Remember that in order to bluff hands, you should not be showing an opponent your hand after making this play as doing so will throw any respect for your poker playing skills will be thrown back to square one.

You also have to remember that the best weapon that an online poker player can possess, is the reputation for been a great player.

Anyway, back to playing the game aggressively.

Advanced sit and go strategy – part 2