You have probably noticed the exciting Sit & Go Hero tournaments in the partypoker lobby, our unique take on jackpot or lottery sit & go tournaments, unique because they play four-handed instead of the usual three, and also because one player is randomly selected to be a bounty.
Players start with 500 chips, the blinds start at 10/20, and increase every three minutes, meaning you only start with 25 big blinds and everyone finds themselves short stacked quite quickly, which in turn increases the excitement factor a few degrees.
Our first tip for Sit & Go Hero success is to not call preflop with speculative hands if the call amount would represent more than 10 percent of your stack. If you make too much of an investment preflop your potential implied odds are too low to make the call potentially profitable. By speculative hands we means holdings such as suited aces, queen-jack, and king-queen.
The small blind is the worst position to play poker from in any game, but even more so in Sit & Go hero tournaments, which is why you should not only be selective with what hands you play from this position, but also play them aggressively. We’d advocate three-betting (re-raising) or folding when in the small blind. By simply calling from the small blind, you are giving the big blind the chance to squeeze you out of the pot with a raise of their own, often resulting in you folding and losing some precious chips. Players are often stealing from the button with a wide range of hands so three-betting as a defence should generally be much more profitable in the long run when compared to flat-calling.
Like in other tournament formats, when the effective stack size of those left to act is only 10 big blinds or less, you should be moving all-in or folding your hand whenever you are on the button or in the small blind. At this stack depth, you don’t have enough room to manoeuvre and make any sort of play, especially because if you are three-bet all-in you are often going to have the correct odds to call anyway. By pushing all-in you give yourself an extra chance of winning the pot because your opponent could fold, and you get to win some precious chips.
Lastly, do not go out of your way to win the bounty payment. By this we mean that your main focus should be on winning the tournament where up to 75% of the total prize pool is awarded. While the bounties can grow large, in relation to the buy-in, they should almost always be an afterthought and seen as a kind of bonus rather than something you should be trying to get your hands on at any given opportunity.
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