Hey guys

Haven’t been around here too often lately, but I started my poker career in here, some of you may remember me. I don’t know if there’s a demand for a “guide” (or whatever you may call it) like this, but here goes... Won't hurt anyone

I thought I could give back something to the community and put together some thoughts on playing 45 man SNGs, as I mainly built my roll through them, before moving on to cashgames.

Now I know that there has always been a lot of discussion about these (besides the 180man sngs), but I think it may help some of you having an essay where all the bits and pieces are roughly drafted together.

I certainly do not consider myself the best at these games, but I’m a decent winner over a sample of a few hundred games in each of the 5.50/11/26 45man SNGs on Tilt. I also do not want to go into a lot of strategy talk, because there are tons of articles from players who know the game better than I do. What I wanna do here is to give you guys an overview on my approach to the game, which was a pretty successful one and was the foundation of a winning poker career.

Sidenote: I’m not a native, apologies for strange sentences and such...


The thing has gotten pretty long, but I hope some of you’ll get around to reading it or parts of it nevertheless

1. Bankroll management
2. State of Mind
3. Multitabling
4. General Strategy guidelines

   a) Early game
   b) Mid game
   c) Shorthanded play
   d) Final table play
   e) Common mistakes

5. Improving, moving up
6. Sites, RB, ROI and other

1) Bankroll management

My poker career started off playing NL10 cashgames on Tilt… I sucked hard, didn’t have a rakeback deal and busted maybe 200$, always depositing 100 at the time (l0 Buyins). I took a break and somehow found a way to grinding 5$ 45man SNGs on Tilt. I didn’t know much about poker yet, been playing in some home games etc, but obviously my roll was gone within days, again. I started posting around here, reading a lot and really thought about my general gameplan. This helped me a lot getting on the right track, and I started to become a constant winning player in these games…

Reading the forums taught me I made some severe mistakes with my BR management. In retrospect, I think having a small BR of less than 10 buy-ins all the time really affected my game and led to suboptimal (-EV) decisions at the tables. And this is how I became a BR nit.

I definitely recommend having around 70-100 buy-ins for those 45man SNGs. It’s not uncommon to experience downswings with a magnitude of 20-25 buy-ins. And seeing your roll decrease by ½ (if you’re only playing with 50 buy-ins e.g.) will definitely influence how you are playing the game, even if you don’t wanna admit it…

When building your roll from 0 however, I think that having a roll of 200$ for the 5.50/45 should be enough. If you think losing 100$ will affect your play, because you really need the money, I recommend starting off lower, with a decent bankroll!



2) State of Mind

To simplify things, I will just put up some Do’s and Don’ts:

DON’T: Play when you’re tired / drunk / stressed / sad / angry
DON’T: Play when you know you will be interrupted in your session
DON’T: Play while answering your phone (really, talking to your girlfriend while multitabling will result in bad play, stupid conversations and a pissed off gf, believe me)
DON’T: Play just for the sake of playing…
…

DO: Play when you are motivated to
DO: Prepare yourself mentally for the session, like reading in the forums for a bit, reviewing a hand, watching a poker vid, until you really feel the urge to start up a session
DO: Stop playing when you feel you’re not on top of your game – Having a downswing even when you KNOW you are playing bad, will result in more bad plays in the long run, because you feel you have to win it all back etc… Vicious circle
DO: Listen to music or whatever helps you concentrate
…

I think you get the points I’m trying to make here…


3) Multitabling

Multitabling is definitely the key to having a decent hourly. For example: If you’re able to 8-table 26$ 45man with an ROI of 30%, you will have an hourly of just around 20$, which is what, twice as much as you get in McD for frying some potatoes?

If you never multitabled before playing SNGs or cash, I’d say you start off by playing 2-3 tables. See how you react to the parallel actions at the different tables. If you feel like you can lean back between the acitons and think you have spare resources, add another 1-2 tables. Rinse and repeat. Be careful though when getting to shorthanded play… You have to pay way more attention to your opponents when the play gets down to 2 tables, you’ll see why later on.

This is really just a matter of training and I think up to 10 tables should be doable for most, if you just slowly add more and more tables.

Also, don’t be too stubborn/proud to reduce the number of tables you’re playing when you feel swamped.


4) General Strategy guidelines

Again, this is not intended as a strategy guide, there are tons of articles and theories about these concepts, so I don’t wanna elaborate much on "how to"… Just "what to" basically.

a.Early game

Play tight, TAG, ABC poker. I just want to underline a few important points here that many TAGfishes at these levels do wrong :

Play aggressive! Reraise with your good hands preflop, take the pots down with aggression on the flop, on the turn. If you play a hand (which should not be too often) try and pick on your opponents. But be careful not to over-aggro yourself by putting all the money in when your opponent is slowplaying. Be patient and cautious, but aggressive when it’s your turn. Don’t be too proud to give up a pot by check/folding when you see your opponent won’t be folding to your bets (if you see he’s a calling machine or if you think he might be slowplaying/not folding his midpair). People are often far too weak in general, use that to your advantage by exerting controlled aggression.

b.Mid game

This is where you should play a similar TAG style as during the early stages, but as average stack sizes shrink, you should start opening up your game against the mid stacks (NOT against the shorties or bigstacked fishes).

Which means: Pick on tight blinds, raise ‘em up.

Try to do stuff like restealing some weaktight TAG open from mid-late position. You should not be doing this in the early stages too often (and also not below the 10$ level), because you won’t have much of a read on your opponents yet, and there will always be people who call your 3bets with AJ and KJo and stuff like that. And you do not want to 3bet these people with crap… Using a HUD helps you enormously with these decisions, especially when multitabling.

c.Shorthanded play

Now things starts to get interesting. This is where the wheat separates from the chaff (is that a saying in English? ^^). Key: Pushbotting.

Pay attention to who is tightening up and who is pushing his 8-10BBs on the button (Note that the play from now on will usually be with very small effective stacks, thus you should not be picking on the shorties too much because they can shove a very wide range back etc.). You cannot play your TAG ABC poker here anymore, you have to adapt to the table and to your opponents. Be willing to call off a push from a decent player who’s constantly shoving from the CO/BTN with stuff like KJo and A9s, 66 etc.

Important thing here is you gotta experiment a bit. Of course, this part of the tournament is crucial to your winrate/hourly, but if you don’t experiment here ever, you will never get maximum value out of your play early-and midgame. Don’t be discouraged when you run into AK when snapping off a shove with A9s... Review the hand, look at the situation again and maybe post it on here, to see if you made the right decision. People will have a hand from time to time, but don’t let that get in the way of you making the correct choice.

Don’t be afraid to go broke before the finaltable. The only thing you gotta worry about is making the correct (better: +EV) play at the time.

d.Final table play

Similar to shorthanded play, you have to pay attention to who is wanting to fold his way into the money and who is a steady winner at the game who will exploit the fish by stealing and restealing preflop on the money/FT bubble.

ICM calculations (or better: estimations) are an important factor to take into account. For example, if you have 0 FE (because of an extremely small stack) on the money bubble, and everyone is battling and reraising preflop, just stay out of their way until you get into a good first in pushing spot with a decent holding.

Balancing these ICM estimations out with pushing spots, is something that needs practice. Try some stuff out, post hands, estimate ranges, talk about spots until you get the hang of it.

e.Common mistakes

Setmining: This should only be done in the early stages, 1-2 blind levels. However, if you’re in position with deep effective stacks, you can also flat your small-mid PPs (mid-lategame). But only do that if you’re willing to make bluffs and floats postflop. It’s just not profitable to only setmine when you have to call more than ~5-10% of your stack, believe me. You’ll just be bleeding money all the time… I had to learn that the hard way…

Weakness: Important thing, so I’ll just repeat that again: Don’t be afraid to go broke on the finaltable bubble or on the money bubble… As long as you’re making good (+EV) pushes you should not worry about this at all.

5) Improving, moving up

I already mentioned the main principles of improving your play in the previous chapter.

Most importantly: Review hands and discuss situations if you’re not sure about why you should be doing A when you think that option B is better. It is crucial that you understand why you’re doing stuff and why this is +EV. Without this knowledge, you won’t be able to develop as a player and will never improve your game.

You don’t need to be able to work out mathematical ranges to 3% by heart, but you should be able to estimate your equity against a rough range.

Experiment, work out rough ranges, discuss hands, and apply your new knowledge to your decisions at the table. This last point might be difficult to do at first, especially when you’re multitabling. If you feel you cannot make optimal decisions while multitabling, cut down on a few tables until you worked that out.

I want to add here that multitabling does of course increase your hourly winrate, but may prevent you from improving your game. You will probably have to play fewer tables when you are shotting/moving up to see how it plays out differently.

Level differences: Of course there are huge skill gaps between the 5.5$ level and the 26$ level… But I found the gap between 5.5 $and 11$ tends to be bigger than between 11$ and 26$. Probably because people can get tokens for the bigger ones, and also because most people with bankroll management will grind out the 11$ level for a long time… You don’t reeeaally have to adapt to that I guess, because as long as you play your tight ABC poker, being aggro in the right spots, you’re pretty much unexploitable in these games, as it often comes down to correct pushing ranges etc. The only thing you gotta be careful about is, if it comes down to you pushing on the BTN into 2 solid winning players… They will also adapt to your wide ranges and probably call you pretty light. So just bear that in mind.

How do you see if a player is a winning player? With time, you will have tons of hands on the regulars, when you 10 table these… Having solid PF stats usually leads to being a winning player in these. At the finaltable, you can always sharkscope a few of them, this could give you very crucial information (www.sharkscope.com, 5 free searches per day).


6) Sites, RB, ROI, Software and other thoughts

I will add some thoughts on these topics later on… (If people are interested)



Hope this wasn’t all tl;dr and I’d appreciate any positive/negative feedback or inputs of any kind.

Cheers and goodluck at the tables
lemming

Wow, great! tl;dnr, but will later...

psyched to read...will go through in a bit and respond with thoughts...think I need to work on something which will offset the MTT variance and pad/protect my BR

Pretty nice basic guide. Would definately recommend to friends who are starting to build a br online. Nice post op

nice read, please continue 6)

Nice job and I agree with everything you wrote. When I started becoming a winning player I also grinded a roll playing 1/45s starting out. I think you inspired me to do a belated 2000 milestone post.

$20/hr seems awfully low for 8-tabling at the $26 level. When I 9-table the $6.50 turbos, I expect to play about 1.3 tournaments per table-hour and hope to beat them for about 25% ROI, which would give $19/hour (6.5 * .25 * 1.3 * 9 = $19.01).

At the lower limits (and especially turbos), I think there are a lot of chips to be had from weak-loose players who will limp with a wide range, but won't play for stacks unless they have a good hand. The ideal player is someone "good" enough to know they should open with their best hands and play something like 31/5. If you're in LP or the blinds with a MP or LP limper, raise at least as often as you would if the hand were folded to you and you are in a blind steal situation.

There's a full essay waiting to be written on this topic, if not more.

Survival is usually an overrated concept in tournaments, but at the FT, you make money when someone get eliminated and there is a non-zero amount of equity in not being eliminated. If you've read Kill Everyone, compare the bubble factors of the player who can be eliminated to the player who can't be eliminated.

Also, check out the trial for The SitNGo Wizard. This can analyze situations faster and more complete than any human can.

nice post

Cheers for the positive feedback everyone Appreciated!


Yep, those are definitely a great opportunity to earn some constant $$ when you're having a tough break at MTTs... I started with those and added some MTTs, which allowed me to basically pay those variance-mind-breaking MTTs with my winnings.

Well, rough calcs there... 8tabling 24$ with 30% ROI:
(8*24$*0.3(ROI))/2.5 (duration) ~20$. Is that completely off?

(Duration that high because you have to start those up and when you stop a session you will decrease on the tables... The turbos probably fill up faster, but it usually takes a while for the 26/45 to fill up. The 11s are waay faster! So not constantly 8, thus averaging on ~2.5h probably, depends on time also)

Very true... I really missed that one. Punishing Limpers is definitely a key concept if you know against whom to use it. Thx for the input.

Hmm, really? Would be pretty difficult though, dunno if I'd even be able to do that... Maybe I'll try something in that direction some time, but lacking time currently for these things (this was written during a boring lecture )

Haven't read that... But sounds interesting, I definitely have to look into it sometime, been recommended to me from various sides now.

The thing is, you really get **** for 6th (and 5th place)... Ofc it might be +shortterm EV if you are able to survive longer than 1-2 of your opponents. But in the end you gotta take a coinflip at some point... And if you are able to do that before the money bubble breaks, you can really abuse the hell out of everyone. Folding into the money seems to be a very very important thing for these guys, so trying to abuse that by risking busting early (by pushing wide+playing aggro) can definitely give you a great advantage when trying to take it down in the end... However, if you are able to get up 1 or 2 spots when fighting out top4, surviving is key obviously... Just some thoughts on that as well.

Did they add a feature for finaltable play of MTTs? Thought that was only for 1 table SNGs (at least few months ago when I looked)...

While it might take 2.5 hours to win a tournament, you're not playing a single tournament for an average of 2.5 hours. Sometimes you'll lose QQ<AK on the first hand and be out in under a minute.

My turbos take 60-75 minutes to win, but I average about 35-40 minutes per tournament. I add ~5 per tournament to allow for downtime registering for a tournament and account for the fewer tables I'm playing at the start and end of a session, and that's how I arrive at my 1.3 tournaments/table-hour figure.

If you're in 2nd or 3rd place with about 6-8 left, you need to play tight against someone who can bust you. Let me give you a specific example:

PokerStars pays out 7 players with this payout schedule (as a multiple of buy-ins): {14, 10, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2}

Poker Stars $6.00+$0.50 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t600/t1200 Blinds + t75 - 8 players

The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked.com

CO: t8436
BTN: t14364
SB: t6274
Hero (BB): t11395
UTG: t2278
UTG+1: t9960
MP1: t11533
MP2: t3260

Pre Flop: (t2400) Hero is BB with [a hand]
5 folds, BTN raises to t14289 all in, 1 fold, Hero?

How much equity do we need to call? If we fold, we have 10,120 chips. If we call and win, we'll have 23,840 chips. If we call and lose, we're out and win nothing for 8th place. Here is our equity for each event, per an ICM calculator:

Fold: 6.608 buy-ins
Call and win: 9.703 buy-ins
Call and lose: 0 buy-ins

The equity we need in order to make a +$EV call is: (FoldEV-LoseEV)/(WinEV-LoseEV) = (6.608-0)/(9.703-0) = 68.10%. Even if we knew he would raise ATC, we can only make a profitable call with 88+. We simply cannot take coinflips when we have significant equity but risk getting eliminated, especially when there are multiple small stacks in the field.

(Also, it's worth nothing that the chips we have now are worth 2.13 times more than the chips we would get from doubling through the big stack. This is what Streib defines as "bubble factor" in KE.)

You can add other payout structures manually and switch between cEV and $EV modes for mid-tournament analysis.

Yeah I would have figured something like 88+;AQ+ just by heart... But it's nice to see those numbers as to why this range has to be that tight.

Cheers for the input, definitely worth thinking through... Great example + math looks solid. I will have to look through it again when I'm less tired though

True what you said about the hourly... I guess it's probably higher then. Can't really do proper numbers at the moment because I'm not grinding these anymore. Cashgames are easier to find out your hourly

Quality read
Have never really tried anything other than real mtts (200 people +), stts and cash.
This thread has inspired me to try a bank roll build up playing the $5.50 45 man sngs on ftilt, going to deposit $350 tomorrow.
Well played op.

Nice post. Thanks for putting it together.

Im going to assume its also a good guide for the 27 player sng's as well.

very nice read bro

Nice post OP, nice additions sopoRific. Nothing new or groundbreaking, but a very good summary of the general principles behind 45 player sngs. I'm gonna recommend it to anyone asking anything about these SNGs!

BTW: I recommend playing these to anyone who wants to sharpen their late-game for MTTs! Also the variance is less high than in MTTs.

Lemming, you and I have seen each other often on tilty in the 45 mans and I really respect your game. Enjoyed the guide, well done sir and keep it coming.

my
$0.02
I think the $11s on Tilt are especially great, particularly to coincide with the $26s.
You can run up to 12/hr for several hrs a night EST during weekdays and loads on weekends as well. A 30% ROI is quickly achievable and often surpassed at this level. Also these rarely go 2hrs and you see so many of the same players they quickly become easy to grind esp if using tracker/office etc; but this holds true to all the 45 mans on tilt.

Definitely... Only difference being, that shorthanded play is even more important, because it will probably last longer because of (slightly) larger stacks. Money bubble further up, which makes finaltable play interesting as well...

Cheers for all the compliments guys...


*bumping* for anyone who's interested

Thanks for thIS post, i came just to read and see if i could get my mind right because i've been on a fast ride to poker hell for the last month or so. So just starting again from scratch trying to figure it all out.

JT

nice post.

Just read through it all, great stuff!
Thanks a lot for sharing your wisdom

Tnx for the guide. It's good to know I'm doing ok in terms of basic strategy
Are you Dutch? (kaf van 't koren scheiden)

I'd like to emphasize that in this particular example 88+ is only valid if he shoves ATC, but you know he's probably tighter. I think if there is one book that can mathematically explain (in understandable language) why we make certain plays in these 45-SNG's it's kill everyone.

Not really, but close (Swiss).

I'm glad to see this stuff has found some targets, so to speak Cheers guys

How do the fields compare on Stars vs. Tilt for the 45-man? I have only played a few $1 45 man tourneys on Tilt, and of course the play was horrible.

Does the skill level of the fields scale up pretty much identically on the two sites, or are the fields on Tilt softer? (i.e. a $11 on Tilt is similar to a $6 on Stars)

One strange thing I have noticed is that the $6 on Stars seems to have worse players than the $3 (although my sample size of the $6 45 man is relatively small)

Hey Lemming , nice refreshing post. I mainly play on stars , but i have a roll of $500 on tilt and have been trying to really find a good game to commit to for while and idiotp0ker says they are good games at the times I would be able to put some hours in. thanks again for the post.

interesting ty