Sit 'n Go Strategy study group -- Part III: High Blind Play

[Slim Pickens]

I guess it's about time for this, if for no other reason than completeness. Long story short, I think this section of the book is not very good at explaining anything important. There are many good sample hands for showing how to make basic push/fold decisions.


My review from Official Book Review Thread:
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Part 3: High-Blind Play

This is easily the most important section of the book, as this is the stage of a STT at which it is least like any other tournament or cash game format. Anyone with even a tenuous grasp on a winning STT game knows prize pool equity trumps chip equity so often that discussing decisions in terms of chip equity can't be effective at determining correct plays. Independent Chip Model (ICM) prize pool equity calculations have passed many rigorous theoretical and practical examinations and have proven sufficiently accurate in the overwhelming majority of high-blind STT situations. ICM modeling is introduced in Part 2 and is covered sufficiently for a beginning player to grasp. Therefore, I’m quite surprised that prize pool equity is largely ignored in Part 3, and when it is applied, it is often applied in a very hand-wavy, qualitative manner nothing like the simple, methodical calculations most good STT players perform on a regular basis.

The Fundamental Theorem of Sit ‘n Go High Blind Play is really more of a good general principle that follows from correct mathematical play. It is too general of a statement. There will be so many “exceptions” that if this “Fundamental Theorem” is taken as such it would cease to look very fundamental at all. There exists a very simple approach to solving high-blind STT problems. The author very obviously knows it well and applies it to a number of his example hands. What I don’t understand is

a) Why this problem-solving methodology isn’t the singular focus of Part 3 until it is fully explained and
b) Why chip equity even shows up at all outside of a comparison to highlight the differences that can arise between it and tournament prize pool equity.

I need to form an argument to debate some of the author’s conclusions in his hand examples, but this is extremely difficult. What I want to argue about is the hand ranges, but the way the material has been presented, it isn’t clear to the reader that opponents’ hand ranges are a critical parameter.


Understanding and executing correct play during the high-blind sections of STTs at the highest levels consists of four steps.

* 1) Understanding how to execute push/fold/call calculations given the input parameters of chip stacks, prize payouts and hand ranges, and a good prize pool equity model. This is basic STT mathematical mechanics and is very similar to what is considered basic and essential knowledge in every other poker format.
* 2) How to determine reasonable hand ranges given any information about opponents. This is the “poker” and “feel” element unique to STTs that non-STT players usually lack and it is crucial for an introductory STT text to cover it.
* 3) The sensitivity of the results to changes in a players hand, his opponents’ hand ranges, and the chip stacks at the table, as well as the limitations of ICM equity modeling and cases requiring special treatment. This is usually what separates the winning high-limit players from the break-even mid-limit players, at least it does today… maybe not two years ago, and might be beyond the intended scope of this book.
* 4) How to alter all parameters except the exact hands dealt to players in real time. This is what separates the good high-limit players from the absolute best (and usually highest-limit) players, and would be well beyond the scope of an introductory text.



All of Step 1 is in there somewhere. It’s not central to most of the section, but it’s in there. Step 2 is also included, although usually much more qualitative and mushy. Also, it is not demonstrated how critically-important this step is. I doubt Collin needed to get Step 3 to think he knew enough to write an SNG book. He probably gets it himself, but it’s not covered except for a few isolated examples that should be pretty obvious to decent players. Anyone who knows anything about Step 4 won’t share. I’ll leave it at that.

So OK, I think I can reconstruct good high-blind SNG play from the information presented, but so what? I already know how to it. It’s my opinion that a decent poker player new to SNGs would learn something somewhere near proper strategy from reading the Part 3, but would be utterly helpless as to explain why any of lol donkament-looking plays are correct. He would also be utterly helpless against changing game conditions; perhaps changes that have taken place since the book’s author last played SNGs seriously. Without a Crystal Pepsi-clear understanding of the methodology behind these plays, a player will be completely lost.

The implicit collusion and micro-stack sections are decent, although I think it all makes much more sense as a variation on the same calculation we should have already done forty times by the time we get to these sections. The examples really aren't that elucidating, as I think most players could guess the correct play without really knowing or caring why.

The heads-up section, all the preflop stuff should be really simple using our methodology. The instruction needs to focus on a discussion of hand ranges, unexploitable play, and profitable variations from unexploitable play. I don’t like many of his post-flop lines. Hand 3-55 is an example of what I think is a really bad logical flaw that shows up in a lot of the example hands.

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Rules:<ul type="square">[*] 1) No flaming Collin, or anyone else. Save the flaming of Collin for the Official STTF Book Review Thread.[*] 2) No unsubstantiated useless answers, even if they're right. If you say something, support it with something else. To phrase that differently: no one-word answers in the vending machine please.[*] 3) No posting copyrighted material. Just assume everyone has the book and say things like "In hand 1-x, I think..." rather than posting the entire hand. My understanding is that posting a few sentences is OK. Posting an entire paragraph or hand is not.[*] 4) No being a jerk. This is thread for beginners so there might be a lot of questions that seem stupid to more advanced players. Deal with it.[/list]