You will find as you study the techniques of very successful STT grinders that they really excel in amassing chips during the later stages of the tournament that give them a bigger advantage once the play becomes three handed and heads up. It is critical to your long term success that the ratio of wins to seconds and thirds is as high as possible. I have seen the stats of many SNG grinders who have a good cash percentage but their results have been skewed towards far too many seconds and thirds.
Not recording your fair share of wins or maximising your wins is one of the biggest downfalls of SNG players. You need to always be on the lookout for chips and I will quote an example here to show why this is the case. You are one of four players left in a ten man SNG with the usual 50-30-20 pay structure. The tournament has gone very well for you and you have a huge T9500 in chips out of the total of 15k in circulation.
You are on the button in this hand and the two players to your left in the blinds have around T2300 each. This leaves the UTG player who is the short stack on a mere T900. The blinds are 150-300 and the UTG folds and you are on the button with 6c-3c. Now there is nothing wrong with folding here but I think that the T450 in blind money is literally there to be picked up just based on the game dynamic.
Both of the blinds will not want to tangle with your big stack when neither of them has not locked up third place yet. The presence of the short stack means that they are under pressure to go all in soon and so either of the two blinds knows that they can make the money without doing anything. So it would need a powerful hand for the two blinds to get involved with you and in this situation then I think a raise to something like 400-500 will take down the pot a very high percentage of the time.
That extra T450 will be extra chips in your stack and less chips in theirs when the crucial battle takes place to see who comes first, second and third. Going into your shell now and sitting back could effectively cost you a couple of thousand to your stack which makes at least one of your opponents a far bigger threat to you when the tournament gets to be heads up. You will win more STT’s if you have a 2/1 chip lead when heads up than if the stacks were equal……it is simple mathematics.
You need to read the situation to optimise your decision making process as best you can in STT’s and always be on the lookout for situations where you can pick up vital chips at any stage of the tournament.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk
GaryLQ
Thank-you Carl, very useful.
I know TPE is primarily an MTT site, but I’ve enjoyed the recent videos from Marc Alioto and DannyN that have focused on STT strategy. More STT content would be very useful to me. There are many times when I only have a couple of spare hours for a poker session, so MTTs are out of the question and STTs become first choice, I’m sure this will apply to many other members too.
torcher
In this situation if you are the big stack I find that if you jam on either mid stack the other players will auto fold to make the money and and so will the one you jammed on because the short stack has 3 blinds . If it gets to you and the small stack in blind vs. blind fold to him to keep the bubble alive and continue to jam on the other two mid stacks. By the time they figure out what you are doing they have nothing left. works every time