Wednesday, May 04, 2005

SnG Thoughts

It's funny how different people have different 'specialties' in poker. Personally, I very rarely play no limit ring games. I fancy myself as a limit poker player, and when I play limit I do well. Other people will watch me play and what seems mechanical to me now, at times seems crazy to them. But that's limit poker and that's not what I'm talking about.

Very rarely do I play limit Sit & Gos. When I play SnGs, I play No Limit. It might be strange at first, but the way I see it is that it's simular to limit because you have a limited stop lose, with a higher win ratio (if you play well.)

SnGs are a strange highbred of poker. When you sit down you know how much you can lose, but you aren't sure how much you can win. Normally in poker you can look at a table, and depending on who is sitting at it, you can take a guess at how good the table is (how much you can win), but it's much more difficult to analyse how much you could lose.

I'm good at SnGs, I place ITM more often than not, I've had days where I will always place in the money. I multitable SnGs and I can normally place in 2/3s or higher when playing three SnGs at a time. This leads me to my next point.

Full Tilt Poker is my favorite site to play on. PartyPoker is my least favorite. However, there is a certain draw at PartyPoker that I can't pass up, and that is the Step Tournaments. In my opinion, the Step Tournaments are the best thing to happen to poker since the check was invented. The problem is that I keep getting bumped around in steps and can't seem to finally get a win under my belt. I don't have much invested, I just keep moving up, then getting bumped back down. It's a great structure for my play. My normal procedure is to get a SnG going on FTP, then wait for one or two people to get knocked out, then start a step tourney on PP (depending on what freeroll I have), get a couple more people knocked out of the FTP one and start another FTP SnG at the same time. As each tourney ends, rinse, wring, repeat.

With some practice you can know what's going on in each tourney. It's a lot of window flipping, but it's a great work out for the mind.

Any comments would be great, and I would love if FTP would follow suit and offer 'Step' tournaments.

-- This article has been cross posted at ephro's blog and FTPFan.com --