You say you're not thinking about BR here, but if you play sng's with less than 20 buy-ins in your bankroll, you'll go broke no matter what you do, so this thread is pretty pointless.

So the answer is: BR may not be considered a skill, and it takes no skill to follow it, but you have to obay it. I won't talk about why this is so important, there are enough threads on this here.