Why not start by playing at the higher limit and make more money?

At the $10 game you will typically find many fish and one decent player. At the $20 game you will find several fish, a couple of decent players and a good player.

This is characterised by how the game ends.

Typically in a $10 game you will get to the heads up with blinds at a very manageable 100/200 and you will have around 4,000 in chips so there is plenty of play left in the game. This is great for you as it allows you to throw away any junk you don't want to play without depleting your stack irrepairably.

Seat six decides 15 big blinds is just not enough.

At the $20 game you will get to the heads up with the blinds at 200/400 and have to make decisions about which hands to play a bit earlier than you would really like. If you are up against a good heads up opponent then you may be forced to go all in with an A rag instead of a pair depending on your chip stack.

So why the difference?

At $10 you have fish who bust out early because they don't use the blind structure properly. This is the essence of good SNG play. You need to use the blind structure to your full advantage to become a winning player. At $20 there are fewer people prepared to risk everything at an earlier stage of the game and so the bust outs are not as frequent.

In $10 (and indeed at $20) it's quite common for someone to move all in with a hand like 10 10 from first position and get called by a higher pair or someone else who wants to gamble their AK in the very first blind level.

What this does is to increase the rate at which hands are dealt in the early part of the game - more hands dealt means more early bust outs and so you get to the end of the game at a premature level. This is why you have to adjust your game for this strategy to work.

So we are going to begin at the $10 level and work our way up. You now have to unlearn all your bad habits to crush this game and begin to absorb and accept a new poker strategy.

So it's a $10 buy in six handed SNG with blinds rising every seven minutes. Let's begin to crush this game.

Last update: 20-06-2008 12:18