Explanation of Sit and Go
Unlike in cash games, players are not free to cash out or rebuy at any time. 💶 Sit and go entrants continue playing until they run out of chips. Prizes are awarded based on the position a 💶 player finishes the event. While the last man standing wins the entire sit and go, prizes are often awarded to 💶 players who outlast the rest of field: 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place etc.
Sit and goes come in a variety 💶 of different styles with different rules and structures. Here is a short list of common structures -
Heads Up, 9-man, 180-man 💶 etc etc – Describes the number of entrants required before the sit and go begins.
Hyper, Turbo, Hyper-Turbo, regular, Deep – 💶 The exact meaning depends on the poker room, but these are references to the tournament structure. Turbo tournaments typically involve 💶 starting with relatively shallow stacks along with fast increases in the blind levels. Deep tournaments are the opposite; deep starting 💶 stacks and relatively slow increases in blind levels.
Double or Nothing – Half of the registrants double their buy-in amount while 💶 the other half walk away with nothing.
Satellite – A tournament where winners compete for entries into a bigger tournament. In 💶 events where more than one ticket is up for grabs, most (if not all) of the winners receive the same 💶 prize (i.e. a ticket).
Winner Takes All – The first place finisher takes down the entire prize pool. Second place gets 💶 nothing.
Like cash games, sit and goes can be 9-handed, 6-handed or heads-up (and any other amount of players per table).
Example 💶 of Sit and Go used in a sentence -> The classic sit and go format runs with 10 players and 💶 awards prizes to the top 3 finishers.
How to Use Sit and Go as Part of Your Poker Strategy
Strategy approach to 💶 tournaments (i.e. sit and goes) are notably different than strategy approach to cash games.
For a start, not all chips are 💶 equal in sit and goes. A technique known as ICM (independent chip model) needs to be employed in order to 💶 correctly assign chips a monetary value. Depending on the exact sit and go situation it may even be correct to 💶 fold pocket Aces (in Hold’em) preflop as a result of ICM considerations. See the glossary entry under ICM and Bubble 💶 for more information on this topic.
Sit and go players spend a larger amount of time playing with shallow stacks than 💶 cash game players do. Cash game players routinely rebuy to keep their stack at 100bb while sit and go players 💶 will frequently find themselves playing at stack depths of 20bb or lower. Understanding the maths behind short-stack scenarios is hence 💶 extremely important for sit and go players.
See Also
