Bookmark and Share by Carl “The Dean” Sampson.

Playing tight during the early stages of SNG tournaments is still an effective strategy at the low level games. In the same way that playing good solid poker in full-ring cash games will still make money at the NL25 and NL50 levels. The number of poor and casual players at these levels should mean that sound play without doing anything fancy should make money.

The low-stakes SNG novices suffer from two distinct flaws with regards their game play and you don’t need to be an expert in ICM theory to be able to exploit them. Firstly they play too loosely during the early stages which in itself is no bad thing. But there is a world of difference between playing loosely and aimlessly and playing loosely and to a pre-designated plan.

Novices tend to aimlessly bleed chips during low blind play which leads to an unnecessary erosion of their stack. This then leads to committal moves being forced on them at earlier stages of the tournament. I have even seen SNG’s where players have made the money by simply folding and doing nothing else. Now I am definitely not recommending to anyone that they do this but what I am trying to underline is in how effective folding can be during the early stages of a one table SNG.

The second major flaw with regards to SNG players at the low-stakes levels is in their mindset when the tournament gets down to the last few places. In my experience, too many players tighten up too much and try to survive by folding. This negative mindset can be so destructive that I have even witnessed huge chip leaders who ended up not even cashing at all simply because of the fact that they tried to fold to the money.

Playing in the exact opposite way against this type of mindset will be one of your biggest weapons and if you can lose the fear of busting out when all about you have that fear then you will be a very formidable opponent when the tournament gets down to between four and six players.

So the answer to the question is “yes”….playing tightly during the early levels in low-stakes single table SNG’s can be very profitable and will remain that way as long as there are novice and recreational players who inhabit these levels and I simply cannot see that situation changing anytime soon.

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