The key: Lowered inhibitions.

You do the math.

The final installment in Rick Braddy’s Sit-and-Go Tournament Tutorial. He continues to fold his small blind, trying to set up a trap. I prefer more aggressive play heads-up and win 57% of the time, lifetime, in SNGs. By accumulating chips as best I can, it enables me to take more risks heads-up, when in most cases I’m never worse than 3-2 pre-flop.

In his recap, he makes the claim that we can make it into the money 80% of the time following the system. Not in the long run. Sorry, I like the videos, but that claim can’t be substantiated statistically. You should make it to the money 33% of the time, on average, if you’re an average player. If you’re better than average, you’ll get a few percentage points higher. At 40%, you’re making really good money – trust me! At 39% ITM, my ROI was 12% long-term, much higher for short runs where I was running 50%+ ITM. There are a couple people playing at a very high level, multi-tabling, are doing better, but they are a miniscule minority. Go to sharkscope and start checking the players you play against in your SNGs, and you’ll see what I mean.

Rick’s strategy is a winning strategy, especially his early and middle game strategy, but nowhere near his claims. Test for yourself.

Rick Braddy is back with Part 5 of his Sit and Go tutorial. Here he is in the middle game, having tightened up a bit and taking time to evaluate the other players’ strategic positions in terms of relative chip stacks and range of likely hands being played. Watch this video for an understanding of how to play the short stack, and how some players wait too long before throwing those short stacks around.

Rick Braddy starts working on the middle game in this video, with about 6 players left. He’s the chip leader here, and he talks about his philosophy of gambling with a small portion of his chips, but still trying to stay patient and let the other players play while he analyzes their play. He shows the benefits of being a bit aggressive with his big stack, but his table is playing fairly loose-weak, so he’s able to pick up a bunch of orphan pots while his opponents wait for each other to get knocked out. He also talks about tightening up as your opponents begin to play back so you can trap them, a benefit of being able to change gears.

From my perspective, understanding the game from a strategic perspective – where you are in relation to the other players and the blinds – is a key to being able to change gears effectively. This knowledge helps you understand your opponents strategic position, so you know who can be pushed around and who is going to be looking for an opportunity to play for their stack.

Here is where I start to see some differences in the way I play and the way Rick plays. Rick is the chip leader, and begins playing some pretty marginal hands out of position. At this stage, I want to play very strategically – I’m a chip leader, I pick weak players during this stage, pop them with selective raises so I can either pick up some blinds or isolate with what are some pretty weak hands. Calling with A6 and 2-2 in EP is a prescription for leaking chips, bit by bit.

Your opinion?

If you recall from Sit and Go Texas Holdem Tournament Poker Tutorial, Part 1, Rick Braddy was advising not to check-and-call, and continues with this advice at the start of Part 2. I’ve played many SNG poker tournaments with a raise-or-fold mindset, and it works extremely well.

Why?

It forces many of your opponents to limit the range of hands they play against you. If they know that when you’re in a hand it will cost them a lot of their chips to play, they will tighten up against you and make it easy for you to read them.

He also advises taking chances when you have the chips to do so. Understanding where you are in the tournament, what I call “Situational Awareness“, is important when doing this. He also introduces his “X-Factor” strategy, which is exactly the same as Dan Harrington’s understanding of your “M”, which Dan took from Paul Magriel.

There’s been so much poker strategy published in the last few years that much of poker strategy has become an echo chamber. But, Rick uses his “X-Factor” in a more global sense than Harrington; where Harrington uses “M” to decide how to play a short-stack, Rick uses “X” in driving decision-making at all levels – big-stack vs. big-stack, big-stack vs. little-stack.

Rick Braddy put this series of videos together to teach sit-and-go strategy. I have a lot of successful experience with Sit-and-Go tournaments, with buy-ins from $.50 all the way up to $500. I’ll be reviewing this series against my own experience and strategies.

In the series, he narrates an actual tournament on Pokerstars, examining key elements. Early strategy is to watch the other players and play tight, but play aggressive when in a hand. This is good, sound strategy for the early stages of a SNG, and will get the player to the middle stages in relatively good shape.