I am currently playing the $3.50's on stars, and have been studying mainly by memorizing push/fold charts, and doing SNG coach questions. One of the areas I struggle most with is playing small pocket pairs with stack sizes of 15-25bb's.

What do we do when our first hand of a SNG we are UTG and get deal a low/medium pocket pair? Do we open shove the medium pairs and fold the low ones? What do we do in late position with 25bb's? I know balance isn't very important at my current stakes, but as we move up, how do we balance our 25bb shove range if we are shoving our pocket pairs?

Also, do small/medium pocket pairs make good squeeze hands? There are lots of limps/calls behind at the $3.50 level, but they don't seem to fold to 3-bet very often, so I am not sure if squeezing is better than folding these hands.

I prefer winning $$ to being balanced.

You don't need to be balanced with this type of hand.

Let's say you are in the CO with 20BB, no ante. You might fold or min-raise most hands, neither of which is ideal with mid pairs, so you jam them. Even if a villain knows you have 99-66 there is little he can do, as he doesn't pick up 88+ often enough to make the jam unprofitable.

Also, no matter how obvious it is that you have a hand like that, nobody is going to exploit your lack of balance by folding hands like AKo which are dogs to your range (or calling JTs, which is flipping).