I've decided to start a SNG challenge to try and determine my true ROI in the 1 table games. Due to the obvious amount of variance in poker, I know I need to play enough games so that the element of luck is effectively negligible, so my goal is to play 5000 sit'n'gos and record my place in every one. Every 50 games I'll record my balance so I can generate some sort of graph at the end. I'm hoping to have an ROI of about 10% meaning for every $1 I make 10c profit (I'm quite new to ROI so if this is wrong please let me know, maybe I'm talking about 110% ROI?)

For the sake of the challenge, I'm going to try to stick to 1 table sngs as much as possible, but if a big Sunday tournament is coming up and I am doing well in the challenge to play in the tournament. I know there's a big Sunday Storm tournament coming up on PokerStars that might be fun to play in.

I will be playing in the micro stakes as that's probably where the least variance is. If things go well, I may move up in the levels, but I'll try to wait until I have at least 100 Buy Ins for whichever level I'm moving up to.

Please let me know your thoughts on the challenge, bankroll rules, sample size etc. Will try to post results every 50-100 games or so. Better get started, I've a lot of poker to play!

I'll sweat your challenge. You're right that if you invest $1 and afterwards you have $1.10, that's a 10% ROI.

I have no idea whether 5k games is a big enough sample size. It will be something, anyway.

I appreciate that you didn't make your challenge/goal results oriented. "I'll put in the volume and study time" is something in your control. "I'll profit this much" or "I'll move up to such and such stake by March" are not really in your control. "

What site are you playing on? What are you doing to review/ study/improve? Since you're recording results by hand, it sounds like you're not using a HUD or tracker... any particular reason?

Thanks man, I appreciate it.

I'm playing on PokerStars.

To study and improve, I'm reading the go pro section of Jonathan Little's book as there's some really interesting non-intuitive stuff in there, he's actually the one who suggested a sample size of 5000 if I'm playing sngs. I'm searching youtube for training videos on STTs and I was thinking of taking say 3 hands from every session I play (as long as the session is at least 2 hours or 30 games long) and post them online asking for the right lines.

I'd like to use a HUD but I'm guessing most of the good ones cost money. My poker bankroll is dedicated to this challenge and I'm a college student so the rest of my money basically goes towards rent and food so I can't really afford any kind of monthly fee for some sort of tracker, but if you know of a free one I can use let me know!

I'm also trying very hard to play my A-game all the time and not tilt when I lose a few games in a row. If I feel myself getting annoyed, I try to remember that even if I lost the next 20 games in a row, that would barely come up as a blip on my graph and I either stop playing for a while or I refocus on playing my best.

Almost have the first 100 games done so I'll put a post up when they're completed and hopefully I'll have a little profit to show for it!

All of the major Huds give a 30 day trial, and a few offer tiered fees. Lower if you're only playing low stakes. Hand2note is free of you're only playing micros, but I'm not sure if that's true for tourneys. Check out hand2note an driveHUD. Also, fpdb is an open source hud.

Thanks dude.

first 100 games done.
Profit: $1.46
ROI: 2.92%
ITM%: 35%
Looks like I'm barely scraping by for now. As far as I can tell I'm playing my standard game but as I've only played 100 games so far it's far too small a sample size to tell accurately yet. For now, the good thing is I'm making a tiny profit of about 1.46 cent per game. Not exactly Phil Ivey standards, but hey, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Goals for next 100 games:
continue to play A-game throughout
Increase overall profit to 2c per game
Increase ITM% by 2%
Most important goal: if I'm almost at the end of the next set of 100 games, I'll not attempt to play differently in order to try and meet goals 2 and 3.

Here we go!

Hey, it beats a -2 ROI! Still plenty of variance in 100 games, too.

Have any hands that stick out?

No hands yet, just a few questions about general strategy:

I've read in countless books that you want to steal blinds from the average stacks when they get high enough, but I've played a few games where all the players are quite passive and we get to the 50/100 level with about 7 players still left at the table. At this stage the average stack is less than 2000 and most players have between 12 and 18 BBs. At this point any raise preflop takes up a large portion of your stack, but it feels too big to be open shoving with a stack greater than 12 BBs so what's the play here? Is there an optimum range to open shove with in this situation?

The second question isn't necessarily to do with the later levels, but in general, what is the maximum stack in terms of big blinds that you can open shove with? Is say 20BBs too much? (I see some people shoving on the first hand with 75 BBs but they're mostly just gambling).

Hey man,

The ranges I use have anything under 15bb is either P/F.. with a few exceptions and spots.

There are also spots where I'm going to be 3b jamming with my entire stack even at times with 30bb+.. so its really dependent.

What I'd do is start constructing your own ranges (or find base ones for SnG and alter them).

Good luck, 5k SnG's 1 tabling will take you a VERY long time, so I'd try and get used to at least 4 tables.

Thanks man, I'll take a look into the ranges you were talking about. Sorry, that was a bit ambiguous. When I say 1 table I mean I'm playing STTs but I usually play 4-5 tables at a time. If I can get access to a bigger monitor I could start playing 6 tables at a time.

I'm aware that it will take a big time commitment. Because of college and stuff once I go back after the break I won't have time to make much of a dent in it until summer. If I can get 500 games played in the next few days that might be something. Aside from that, or when I have the occasional Friday or Saturday night free, I won't be able to put in a normal amount of volume. That being said, I'll gladly take suggestions for books on sitngos or links to coaching videos.

thanks guys, appreciate it!