The starry appeal of Sit & Go tourneys more popularly known as single table tournaments is that they present the entire experience of the tournament in a short and power packed compact format. This is in stark contrast to a multi table tourney that consumes precious hour upon hour of your time and at the end of it all might not even pay any dividends so to speak. On the other hand a Sit and Go tourney is usually action packed and is over in under an hour with not much to lose.

The comparisons are similar to the tests and ODI formats of cricket, a game popular in Asia and down under. Sit and Go games also come with the option of stop loss that is you get to know the maximum amount of bucks you may lose if you choose to keep on playing.

Some classic Sit and Go tournaments

Nuts and bolts – Game structure

Usually a Sit & Go tournament has a minimum of six and a maximum of ten players. There is no set time for a game to start to end at. Play is started as soon as the table warms up, i.e., the minimum number of players join the table. The game can be kicked off for as cheap as one-dollar-a-chip and can be taken up from there to a tally of a few hundred bucks.

It also has a fair distribution of the prize money of the pot. For example, on a table of ten players the booty is divided amongst the top three finishers with a ratio of 50:30:30 for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd player respectively. And in case of minimum attendance on the table, that is only 6 players, the booty is split 75:25 between the 1st and 2nd finishers respectively.

Chips and blinds

Chips and Blinds is kicked off like any typical hold’em tourney with each player on the table having the same amount of chips and as the game proceeds, blinds go up. For pros and connoisseurs of the real hold’em tourneys, it might be a bit intimidating to adjust to this compact version of the game as the tourney itself kicks off with very low stakes which a pro might find too less for wasting his/her time on and also be shocked to find that the blinds go up too quickly for someone taken to the laid back style of the game to realize.

Unlike most of the other multi table games where the players are given a minimum of 1500 chips, here each player gets only as many as a 1000 chips a piece. A set sequence is followed for raising the blinds. They are raised after every 10 minutes of the game if it’s a table with maximum attendance or they are raised after every 12 hands if there are only six players on the table.

Strategy – Blinds

These tourneys provide a lot more action than multi table tourneys. It is important that plaers maintain a fast pace as the blinds go fast. Tables consisting of a lot of tight players tend to end in ‘lotteries’ with large blinds forcing players to take big risks or face being blinded out.