The Contrarian’s guide to Sit & Go strategy Part 3

In Part 1 of this series I talked about some of the strategies I use during the early stages of low-limit Sit & Go tournaments that fly in the face of the conventional wisdom. In Part 2, I went over my thoughts on the middle stages of Sit & Go tournaments, and although my strategies here are more conventional they were still a little different than the typical strategies espoused. In this, the final installment of the series, I’m going to give you my thoughts on the End-Game in S&G’s; playing when you have made the money.

Once the money bubble is burst your chip-stack, and the chip-stacks of your opponents, are the biggest indicator of how you should play. The reason I say your chip-stack instead of how your opponents’ have been playing is that once the money bubble is burst peopled tend to change their style of play dramatically. So, someone who has been an uber-nit may suddenly start calling with J/7 offsuit now that they are guaranteed a payday.

Fortunately, these same people who suddenly change into different players don’t have the same awareness of their opponents, so it’s possible for you to make the same type of change and for your opponents to not pickup on it right away.

So how do stack-sizes affect decisions at this stage of the tournament? Here are just two of the many distinct ways:

#1 – when there is an overwhelming chip-leader, you are comfortably in second place, and the third players are extremely short-stacked. In these instances you should play a bit tighter and let the short-stack tangle with the chip-leader. If you doubled the short-stack it’s quite likely you will be even or have switched places. Where if the chip-leader doubles them up you are likely to still have a decent chip-lead over them, and at the same time the chip leader has come back to earth. These are what I call win/win situations: you wither makeup ground on the chip-leader or move-up on the payout scale.

#2 – you are the overwhelming chip leader and the other two players are about even chips. In these cases the other players tend to try to let you eliminate the other player, and usually only call with fairly strong hands. So if they have about 6-8 Big Blinds each you can usually steal their blinds fairly often, and even if you do double one of them up you have basically just changed the scenario to #1 above.

At this stage of the tournament (especially in turbos and fast-paced S&G’s) the best method to use is a push or fold strategy based on ICM. You can find ICM charts online that show you precisely what hand ranges you can push with based on your stack to blind ratio.

From there your experience with different types of opponents will help you adjust the ICM chart to each player, and coupled with the stack sizes you should finish in 1^st place far more than your opponents do.

Go to Part 1

Go to Part 2