Sit and Go Stack Strategy in Poker

Regardless of what game you are playing, if you're in a sit and go you need to go about it the same way in terms of your stack strategy. When most people play a sit and go they look at their stack in terms of how many chips, or in some cases "dollars," they have. This is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make when you sit down to play, because it doesn't give you a good idea of how long you can stay in a tournament. If you make a mistake with your chips late in a tournament or on the bubble, it could mean the difference between finishing in the top 3 and finishing on the bubble.

Anywhere in the tournament you stack may fluctuate based on the blinds, the cards that you're dealt, or maybe knocking someone out on a bad beat; but depending on how far into the tournament you are, even a double up may not help you. This is because the power of your stack should not be dependent on the nominal value of the chips but rather how many blinds you can pay before you go bust. Regardless of where you are in a tournament, knowing how many blinds you have left always tells you your standing in a tournament.

In the beginning of a sit and go, it is very common to start with as many as 75 or 100 big blinds and never less than 50 usually. At this point in the tournament you can really hang back and rest assured that you will be able to sit and wait for the cards you want to play as there is no real reason to play marginal hands when you can sit around for 50 full rotations of the dealer before you are forced to play. When play really starts getting going and blinds begin to rise, you may see your stack dwindle to a more reasonable 20-30 big blinds worth. This is still a very advantageous place to be as a stack of 30 big blinds would give you 20 full rotations of a table (180 hands dealt in a 9 player sit and go) before you would go bust. With this many blinds you are able to wait your turn and play pretty much whatever hands you want. It's really only when you get down to under 10 big blinds left that you have to begin playing marginal hands in order to try and get a double up, but if you play correctly in a small sit and go (1-3 tables) you won't really have this happen to you until the middle of play. In summary, try and think of your stack as blinds rather than as just chips. If you instead think of your stack as just chips, you may find yourself (especially in larger sit and go's) thinking that you have tons of chips because your stack is many times the size of your starting stack but in reality it could actually have the playing power of a small fraction of your original stack size depending on how far you are into the sit and go and your relation to the other players.