Reviewing your play is the most important thing you can do to improve your poker game. You know it’s true and still you don’t do it.
You tell yourself all kinds of lies.
You are losing money if you don’t review your play. Of course, there is one valid excuse for not reviewing your play – you don’t know how.
If that’s the case, I’m going to change that.
How to Review Sit ‘N Go Sessions
Sit ‘N Goes are the easiest games to review. There’s no line balancing, no real post-flop play; just value raises and shoves.
There are tons of articles across the net that will tell you what hands you should play during the different stages of a SNG. Despite what I may have said in an earlier article, the right way to play the early stages of a SNG is super tight.
You’re basically waiting for premium hands and that’s it. It’s the late stages of a Sit ‘N Go that get interesting.
In the late stages of a SNG, you’ll shove AJo, K7o, T8o and worse. Whether or not your shove is correct will depend on your position, the action, the stack sizes, the size of the blinds, how loose or tight your opponent is and how many players are left. It’s a lot of information to digest, fortunately there’s a mathematical model that takes all these factors into account: the Independent Chip Model.
The Independent Chip Model is too complicated to figure out using a pen and paper. Fortunately, Sit ‘N Go grinders can just import their tournaments to SitNGo Wizard and easily find their mistakes (there’s a 30-day free trial too. This software is REQUIRED for all serious SNG players). Once you import your tournaments, SNGwiz will tell you which shove/fold situations you got right and which ones you botched. There’s even a simulator for you to get a feel for when to shove.
Of course, there are situations that SNGwiz can’t figure out. For example, if you want to know if you made the right move raising with the intention of folding to a shove, you’ll have to do a little more work.
Let’s say you have a $3000 stack with 5 players left and the blinds are 60/120. It folds around to you in the small blind. Your opponent is a very tight-aggressive regular with 1800 chips. You think he’ll shove over your raise with 20% of his hands. Should you raise to steal?
If you raise to $360, you’re risking 300 chips to win 180. In 100 trials, you’ll win 180 chips 80 times (180*80=14400) and you’ll lose 300 chips 20 times (300*20=6000) which means that your steal has a positive expected value of 84 chips. (14400-6000=8400/100=84).
Next you can use an ICM calculator to see how that chip gain will affect your equity.
Now you have no excuse not to review your Sit ‘N Go sessions. Not only did I tell you how to do it, I gave you a link to a free 30-day trial of the best Sit ‘N Go software on the market.
In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about reviewing your cash games.
Ready to try out your new poker skills? Play for real or free at:
