Just Research So Far

So I spent this afternoon finding out the excellent book 'kill everyone'. It has a very unfortunate name for a poker book, but I really believe it is the absolute best NLHE tournament book that has ever been written, period. All of the mathematics is covered and there's plenty of charts and data to demonstrate the theory.

So the first part of my foray into 9 man SNG was to get the book out and remind myself of a few of the risk/reward considerations when playing. I think I have to slightly adjust my previous assertion about strategy. I still believe that playing a semi loose strategy is the best way to go, but actually when starting a SNG we have slightly more risk than an absolute cash model but only somewhere around 1.23 (or 23% more risk in stacking off). {This number, known as 'bubble factor' is a ratio that represents the increased risk of losing your tournament life at that stage in the tournament. In a tournament doubling up does NOT double your equity in the game, so we have to be more careful in all-in pots}. Basically there's no reason why we cannot use our skill advantage post flop but we must be a little more cautious when putting chips in the middle. This will likely equate to betting less often on each street and being careful to call less often (in other words adjusting the pot odds using the bubble factor).

The next step is to begin to play games and study some of those situations. A long time ago I invested in the tool 'the SitnGo Wizard' which I have used in my tournament forays recently (remember the great run I had in the 90-man tournaments on Full Tilt that made me a few hundred quid? - SNGWiz played a big part in that). I feel pretty tired today so I don't think I'll play any games but I'll begin to put a few situations into the hand quiz on the tool and begin to attempt to get a feel for the push fold situations. Then all that's left is to play and learn, then play again.

I think at the micro stakes buy-ins (likely full of fish I'd guess) 10% should be a realistic goal for ROI. If I 6 table these games with an average running time of 30 mins that's 12 per hour so an hourly return of $12-$18 is possible if I play well. That's a better return than the cash games I was playing in, so if I can make it work it could be a better situation. Time will tell. GL