There is a tonne of threads started by new players wanting to ‘know’ whether they should play sit and go’s or cash games. The problem is there is not an answer set in stone as to what you should or should not do. Poker is a game whereby you can’t just press buttons and end up winning over the long term. You need to be able to enjoy the game, and critically assess your mistakes so you can learn from them. Furthermore, you need to be able to see where you are going right in order to build upon your skills and take your game to a new level. If you don’t enjoy the game you are playing, this isn’t going to happen and you will find yourself stuck in a rut that you can’t get out of when it comes to trying to improve.
If you have tried both cash and sit and go, you will find that you will feel more comfortable playing one over the other. This natural enjoyment and comfort within the game will go a long way to developing the skills that you need in order to move up the levels within no limit hold’em, and it is probably this one which you should pursue.
Some people struggle a lot when starting with cash games due to the fact that each pot could potentially cost them $x if they lose it. To them, this outweighs the element of being able to win $x when they take the pot down. Therefore the psychological barrier of losing will greatly affect their play and mean that they can’t play their best game. Also, in terms of the micro limit games where calling a pre flop raise might only be $0.06, some people again view the money as an absolute factor rather than a relative one and say to themselves “ahh what the hell, 6 cents is nothing, I call”. Obviously, this is the wrong way to think about things. If you find yourself thinking this way in cash games, then they probably aren’t for you. This was something I found when I first moved to cash games, and I know from reading a lot of posts that a lot of beginners also experience this psychological effect when playing too.
With sit and go’s, once you have paid the buy-in, you are able to forget about the money on each hand, as you have tournament chips instead. The motivational factor for winning comes from looking at the prize pool and being able to be a definitive ‘winner’ of a tournament. Again, for the people who enjoy sit and go’s, the element of seeing themselves with a 1st place next to their name outweighs the potential risk of losing their buy in when they place 4th. When I first started playing sit and go, I know this is what motivated me, knowing I could by regarded as the official winner and I had a pokerstars e-mail to confirm it!
In terms of game play, the main difference between the 2 is essentially that cash games have no set of correct plays and are very player dependant whereby you need to work out what each player is doing. Obviously there are standard plays in each spot, and there are some plays that will never make you money, but the possibility to manipulate opponents and make plays based on what their hands look like is a lot more apparent.
In sit and go’s, there are essentially correct and incorrect plays. Once the blinds increase so that you have less than 20 big blinds, there are fundamentally right and wrong ways to play. Your edge in these games come purely through learning the endgame strategies and very little else. Obviously there is room to make plays based on certain players (if you know the small blind is always attempting to steal you can start jamming a wider range from the big blind), but by and large, you can learn a strategy to beat $2 sit and go’s which will still be able to beat $20 sit and go’s too.
Ok so profit potential...
Well obviously if you get up to playing like NL1000 then there is extreme scope for profit in terms of actual $$$. In fact, being able to beat NL100, or possibly even NL50 can generate $50 an hour depending on number of tables and win rate. For those of you don’t use poker tracker/ hold’em manager, I certainly recommend it. For those of you who do, you will probably know that 10ptbb/100 (20bb) is extremely good, and 5ptbb/100 (10bb) is still a very good win rate, which probably a more realistic and sustainable win rate for the majority of people. At .01/0.2, a 5ptbb/100 win rate equates to 20 cents per 100 hands. Assuming you can play 5 tables; this is about $0.80 an hour (each table will play roughly 80 hands and hour). As you can see, the profit potential isn’t great for cash games at the micros unless you can mass table (12+) however, if you mass table you won’t be improving your skills, which should be your primary aim if u chose to pursue cash.
For sit and go’s, I’m not entirely sure how ROI is calculated, and I’m certainly not going to try and explain here. However, from experience, I estimate that you could make a profit per game of roughly 10% of the buy in quite easily (if u play $20 buy-ins you could make $2 per game on average pretty easily in my opinion). Therefore if you buy in to a sit and go for $2 you could probably make an average of $0.20 per game pretty quickly. The interesting thing with sit and go’s is that you can mass table them easily, and once u learn a set strategy you can move up the stakes very quickly, as play at higher levels is pretty similar to the lower ones. So therefore you could be 10 tabling $2 sit and go’s, for roughly $2 an hour, making over double what you would be at cash games, whilst still playing correctly/ unexploitably for the most part.
The only problem in terms of sit and go’s is that they get to a stage where you literally won’t have an edge because everyone is playing a correct strategy. This will occur at like the $100 buy in’s though so if you are starting at $10< you probably don’t need to worry. Just bear in mind that if you want to start making $50+ an hour, you will probably have to switch to cash games at some point.
So in terms of what games to play, it depends on what you want from poker. If you are looking to build a roll quickly and have a problem psychologically with playing for small amount of money (e.g. you chase draws because “its only 20 cents” without thinking about pot odds) then sit and go’s are probably going to be best.
If you are looking grind up a bankroll and you don’t really mind how long it takes, but you want to be able to beat higher stakes games and potentially go pro in the future, then I would certainly recommend cash games. Whilst you might not make a great hourly in the beginning, once you get the ball rolling and move up you will have a massive edge in cash games over someone who has built a roll from sit and go’s and is just switching over to cash.
As an end note, I certainly would
not recommend switching between the 2 when you are learning. Once you become a winner at both games you will recognise there is a huge difference between the 2. Playing with 100 big blinds or more is a lot different to playing with 30 big blinds, and you will get into such tricky spots if you try taking a sit and go strategy to a cash table. for example, when your AK gets raised on an AJ8 flop you will have a really harder time playing with 150 big blind stacks, even though by this time in a sit and go when u have 20 big blinds you will effectively be all in.
You will also find your play is affected in sit and go’s where you will never really have the implied odds to call or float a flop bet like you would in a cash game, and therefore get yourself into trouble just draining away chips trying to hit draws
Last edited by jackwilcox; 05-13-2009 at 10:33 AM.