Found @ PokerMunch.com

In any poker tournament, no one wants to be the one to burst the bubble, in other words no one ever wants to be the last person to be eliminated before a prize is awarded. Experienced successful tournament players will tell you one of the most important stages in tournament play is the period that the bubble approaches. This is when players start to tighten up, and those players who came to win all of a sudden just came to try and cash. Small stacks are holding on for dear life, and a lot of the times big stack players will just try and ride it out till the bubble has burst.

No where is this more evident than in Sit n Go tournaments. Players at this point have invested a fair amount of time into the tournament, and they do not want to exit without getting at least a little bit of money back. This can work to your advantage, allowing you to take down pots by playing aggressively and not having to showdown your cards. Even though you may play more liberally in this period, you must always be aware of how your opponents are playing, this is probably the single most important factor in winning or losing. It becomes quite apparent which players at the table are fearful of busting out of the tournament before being in the money. Be cautious about just….continue reading article at PokerMunch.com

Posted by Beck @ Steal The Blinds
I’ve been playing a fair number of low-stakes ($10+1 - $20+2) SNGs lately, and have been meeting with a great deal of success. I can safely attribute much of that success to many of the great posts on SNG play written by other bloggers out there. As such, I wanted to give something back, but couldn’t really think of a topic that hadn’t been covered. Then I hit on the idea of discussing specifically 4 handed play (i.e. when the original 9 or 10 players have dwindled to 4, with only the final 3 being paid) not as in SNGs which start out with only 4 players). That’s where I feel my game is at its strongest, and If I last that long, I routinely go from 3rd-4th place to 1st-2nd place by the time the bubble pops.

Play on the bubble in any tournament, obviously, is a very different dynamic from play at any other point. Everyone is terrified of getting knocked out one off the money, and there are substantial advantages to be gained as a consequence of the simple fact that your opponents are cognizant of the potential to merely fold their way into the money. The last thing they want to do is take a risk which could knock them out in 4th after having spent close to an hour slogging it out in the trenches of a one table war.

The way to take advantage of this timidity is to…. read rest of article at Steal The Blinds

By Adam Small
When I first started playing poker online in mid 2003, I played $1/$2 limit cash games and low buy-in STT’s (also known as “minis” or “sit-n-go’s”). My bankroll was tiny at the time (rarely more than $100 in any online account at any given time), and it was right for me to keep so little in, because I did not possess the skills to be a steady winner.

After playing thousands of STT’s, and learning quite a bit more about poker in general, I now am a master of these tournaments. I don’t play STT’s with a higher buy-in than $50, but in the ones I do play, I am a consistent money finisher, and I almost never finish 3rd. I’m here to share with you the secrets to my success in STT’s.

Let me first make sure all readers understand that I’m referring to STT’s with a buy-in of $50 or less, and that I generally stick to “full-table” STT’s with this strategy. A number of adjustments are needed when playing in higher buy-in STT’s (where play is tougher and more aggressive) or in shorthanded STT’s, such as the 6-seated ones on UltimateBet. I’m not going to get into those adjustments in this article, so just know that what you are reading refers to low buy-in, 9-handed or 10-handed STT’s.

The reason I like full-table STT’s is that the payouts allow you to still make a decent profit even if you aren’t able to win heads up, which can often have a lot to do with luck, since the blinds get so high at that point. Another reason I like them is that it…. read rest of article at Pocket Fives

Steve Badger is fond of saying that if you’re a losing player, you need an infinite bankroll. If you follow the no limit Texas holdem SnG strategy in this article, it’s unlikely you’ll be a losing player. But you still need enough of a bankroll to avoid what they call risk of ruin, which is the chance that you’ll catch a losing streak that will wipe out your bankroll before you can win enough to catch back up to your positive expectation.

The standard guidelines I’ve seen on discussions in various places on the internet is that you need between 20 and 30 buy-in’s at whatever level of sit and go you’re playing in. So here are the bankroll requirements at the various levels of play. (We recommend avoiding the $5 + $1 because the house rake is twice as much at that level, and the play at the $10 + $1 level isn’t enough to warrant paying the extra vig on the entry fee.)….  Read rest of article at Unknown Poker

It seemed like we hadn’t won a sit-n-go tournament in years. We wondered: Were we getting unlucky or were we just crap? Enter Shannon Shorr, Chip Ferguson, and Joey Michael, three of the internet’s most celebrated sit-n-go specialists, to point us in the right direction. Oh, and it turns out we were just crap.

Bluff: Tell us how you began playing sit-n-gos online and what levels you played

Shannon Shorr: I played mostly on Party as BLUFFforRENT, and I mostly played the Speed $215/530s. [A “speed” or “turbo” sit-n-go is a sitn- go in which the blinds move up more rapidly than they would in a normal one.]

Joey Michael: I play as Newtbuggins on Party and bigjoe2003 on PokerStars. I started playing sit-n-gos in December, 2005. I began with the $55s and moved to the $215s when Party did the software and structure upgrade for their sit-n-gos. Then this May, I moved up to the $530s, and have been playing those ever since.

Chip Ferguson: I’ve been playing sit-n-gos since September 2005. I started playing the $109s, and moved up to the $215s in February, and finally started playing $530s in May. My screen name is z32fanatic on all sites….. read rest of article at Bluff Magazine