How to become a Sit'N'Go Grinder
Do you realize you could be earning $50k a year playing poker as a part-time job? It’s true. Prepare yourself.
Turbo Sit’n’Go Texas Hold’Em is, in my opinion, the simplest and most straightforward version of the game today, but paradoxically one of the easiest to be terrible at – thus plenty of fish (them) for the sharks (us) to feed on. You play super-tight at the early levels, you steal and re-steal in the middle stages, and you push/fold in the later stages. The game requires a great understanding of the ICM (Independent Chip Model), the effects of stack sizes, blinds, and position, and a feel for the proper pushing and calling ranges for yourself and your opponents. (If you don’t know what ICM is, look it up. If you can’t be bothered, then you don’t have the initiative to take this on. Get a job.) All of these are quite learnable. From there on in, it’s all gravy.
The first thing to do is get a brief education on the basics. Find out a thing or two about pot odds, bet sizes, and hand strength – this can be found anywhere, so go out and look. Remember – initiative. Read through FlopTurnRiver.com’s SitNGo Strategies section (http://poker-strategy.flopturnriver.com/) and SitAndGoPlanet.com’s (http://www.sitandgoplanet.com/index.html) excellent ‘A Comedy of Errors’. Start playing a few Turbo Sit’n’Go games (I believe Turbo SnG, 1 or 2 tables, is the best because the games go fast and there is rarely opportunity for post-flop play, thus greatly reducing the learning curve), one at a time if you must, but preferably two or three at once. You want to gain experience quickly and get used to multi-tabling; besides, I guarantee that proper play is tighter than you will want to play at first. Multi-tabling alleviates the boredom of waiting for the right hands. Once you start to get a feel for things (this shouldn’t take too long – think 5-20 hours), go back and re-read the articles, then move on.
Take a look at FlopTurnRiver.com’s SitNGo Experiment (http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...hs-t65721.html) as an example game to give you an idea of proper play. Read through the hand histories, figure out what’s going on, and learn from some truly great players. Notice the differences between their game and the retard-laden games you’ll be learning on. There’s a lot to grasp and you probably won’t get it all at first, so take your time and re-read it after playing a few more games.
SitNGo Wizard is an absolutely essential software program. SNGWiz is available for a free 30-day trial and comes with an excellent tutorial (more required reading), a very helpful hand history analyzer, and an awesome quiz feature. When you use the quiz, adjust the settings to levels that are more representative of real play (IE, in a real game, you will have between 4-15 Big Binds in your stack when the decisions start to get tough, not 1-100 as it defaults to). I also recommend PokerTracker to keep, well, track of your poker games and help you spot leaks, as well as PokerAce HUD, an add-on program that gives real-time stats on your opponents (this does a decent job of reading opp’s betting habits for you – a must when multi-tabling).
Keep playing while you read this stuff and buy the programs. You want to incorporate what you read into your play as quickly as possible so it transfers to your subconscious instead of being forgotten.
So now you’ve been playing a few hours a day for a couple of weeks, you’re getting a feel for things, and you’re starting to really digest the reading you’ve been getting into. You feel like an ace because you whallop the competition at the play money tables, and possibly for real money at the micro limits as well. Good job – believe me, it took me a lot longer than a few weeks, but then I didn’t have a guide to take me through it. By now you’ll have noticed that you don’t always win - sometimes you lose. Sometimes you lose a lot. Get used to it. It may be that you have leaks in your game that you need to plug. It may be that you moved up a level and the competition has gotten tougher. Probably it’s just natural variance that everyone, pros included, experience on a regular basis. Take good care of your bankroll, focus on long-term results, and you’ll be fine. Remember, an individual game of poker isn’t just a game; it’s a tiny piece of one big lifelong game where the results are measured, not in pot sizes or number of hands won, but in hourly rates averaged out over hundreds and thousands of games.
Now it’s time to start making money. What you NEED to do is learn to effectively multi-table. This is absolutely key to Sit’n’Go success. Because the decisions are relatively simple and can be made without much conscious effort (once you learn how – unconscious competence requires experience), you can run 4, 6, 12, or maybe even more games at a time. Some people stagger their games; others join new games continually without regard to start times. Personally, I prefer to get up to my max number of tables as quickly as possible, then join a new game as soon as one ends. Whichever way you decide, it’s going to get hectic. Have Mom hold all your calls. Now, playing 12 tables is going to be difficult on a single monitor, so get yourself a second computer or just another monitor and set it up as an extension – this can be done with most video cards, and if you ask a computer tech, I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to show off his ‘l33t skills’ by helping you out. N00b. You could use a single monitor and cascade your tables rather than tiling them, but I find that things get confusing fast and tables start getting lost, so I think you’re better off to spend a couple hundred bucks and do things right. And speaking of doing things right, get yourself a comfy chair and a decent desk, in a nice quiet room with a pleasant décor. You’ll thank me in a few weeks.
The reason multi-tabling is so necessary is really quite simple – more games equals more profits. You will play marginally better with less tables, but the math is brutally clear. First, assume the average SnG takes 36 minutes - winning takes longer, but you won’t always win. So for each table you have open, you play 1.67 games per hour. Let’s give Simple Sam an unrealistically huge 40% ROI (Return On Investment) playing at one $16 table at a time. That’s $26.67 invested per hour times 0.4 for a net $10.67/hr. Not bad. Now we’ll give Quick Quincey a fairly weak 10% ROI at the same tables, playing 12 tables at a time. That’s $320 invested per hour times 0.1 for a net $32/hr. I know who I’d rather be. And you know what? Those ROIs were exaggerated for the sake of the example. In reality, at these stakes a winning player should be able to earn a 25% ROI if he gives each game total focus, and around 18% if he multi-tables like I’m suggesting. Think about what I’m telling you, and then think about what the difference in earnings means to you. Personally I prefer Earl’s to McDonald’s, but you’re entitled to an opinion.
Make sure that when you play, you keep a record of your time at the tables, money invested, and money earned. This gives you feedback, keeps you accountable, and gives you solid proof you can show to your girlfriend the next time she yells at you to get a real job. She’ll change her tune when you show her the profits column. You have a real job, it’s called poker, and it kicks ass.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot - at the start of this article I promised you an ambitious $50k a year working part time, and I intend to deliver. Are you ready? OK, here we go: I define part-time as 20hrs/week, and there are about 50 weeks in a year, which makes for one thousand working hours in a year. Eventually you should be able to make your way to the $27 level and earn a respectable 10% ROI there. 12-tabling at 36 minutes per game gives you 20 games an hour. That’s $540 invested per hour for a net gain of $54/hr. Multiply that by one thousand hours, and hey-presto, you got yourself $54,000, kid! Love it. Then realize that with practice you can probably earn a higher ROI and can definitely move up in stakes at some point – not to mention bonus-hunting (a subject for another article), which can increase your profit by a few thousand bucks a year. Now love me for showing you the way.
So there you have it. Learn the basics, read the literature, get the software, start multi-tabling, set up a proper space, keep good records, and practice, practice, practice. You’ll notice that I haven’t given you any tips on how to play the game, nor promised you that this won’t take a lot of dedication, hard work, and practice – the tips are in the reading, and if you think ANYTHING can be achieved without effort, well, go smoke another one. What I have given you is a road map to follow. Let me know how you do. I’m on that road myself, and a few (a FEW – don’t go showing this to all your friends because the more winning players there are, the less profits I make) friends along the way never hurts.
