The first thing you need to employ in your plan is that there is no rush to double up in the beginning.  Many players think differently as they try to go all-in ASAP in an effort to take all of somebody’s chips.  But you should never try to force an all-in call just for the sake of doubling up.

Instead, you should play conservative in the beginning so that you avoid all of the maniacs who have no regard for their tournament buy-in.  If you happen to land A-A and somebody wants to go all-in pre-flop, then by all means put them to the test.  But other than these kinds of situations, you should be wary of jumping into the heavy action too early.

Just remember, you’ve got a whole tournament to be aggressive so don’t get stuck trying to prove something in the early going.

Another thing to be mindful of in the beginning stages of a Sit & Go is playing your position right.  This should go without saying since nearly every player knows the basics of playing early, middle, and late position.

But you should play even more conservatively in early position during a Sit & Go since your chip stack is finite.  In other words, you can’t just add more to it once the stack starts dwindling like in a cash game.  The best strategy for early position is scaling back your starting hand requirements so that you aren’t playing dominated hands like A-Q.

When a player gets eliminated from the table, it effectively means two things for those still seated, the blinds will come around quicker, and your paying more for each hand. Think of it this way, if there are 4 players left and the blinds are at 50 /100, your paying approx 37 in blinds each hand, or 150 every 4 hands.

If a player is eliminated then your now playing 150 every 3 hands, or 50 a hand. As a result you are forced to gamble more to counter the ever increasing blinds.

Chip stack and blind size should influence your hand selection strategy and hence how loose your play is. So naturally as a table progresses, blinds climb higher and players get eliminated, it is going to become necessary to loosen up your playing style and gamble more. Further more when there are 9 players seated at a table, there is likely to be 2 rather good hands amongst them, either AK or high pockets ect, however as there are only 3-4 players left, the chance of someone having such a good hand is diminished greatly and hence you can play a lot more aggressive with mid range cards such as pocket 8’s

The final argument for the tighter earlier, looser later strategy is the pay out structure. Most Sit n Gos and final tables will pay out the largest percentage to the top 3. Hence you should aim for 3rd. Once you have made the money, it is a lot easier to gamble up for 1st. You’ve already turned a profit, so change from the tighter strategy and gamble to make more.

However, you can still use suited connectors to your advantage in Sit and Go’s as long as you remember one thing: don’t place too much value on them.  Instead, you need to look for opportunities where you can get in multi-person pots as cheaply as possible.  And the best opportunities for doing this present themselves in the early parts of Sit and Go’s because the blinds are lower.

With the blinds being lower, there will be a lot more limpers which means this is the perfect chance for you to limp in with them in a multi-person pot.  Of course you’ll want to wait until you’re at least in early-late position when limping since you don’t want to risk getting raised by someone else at the table.

Once the blinds raise into the higher levels, suited connectors aren’t nearly as valuable if you’ve got one of the bigger stacks.  That’s because there will be fewer players still alive, and the blinds will be so high that you can’t risk calls and bets for an outside shot at a straight.  Of course, if you’re one of the short stacks left in a Sit and Go then suited connectors can be valuable when trying to steal blinds and small pots from other players.  Plus they’re also a solid hand to push with if you’ve got no other options than to push or fold.

When the Carbon marketing team were sitting around discussing the Sit’n'Go leaderboard before its introduction, we were expecting maybe a few people would reach streak bonuses of 5. Maybe even a 6 if they were exceptionally lucky. But now a quick glance at the leaderboard shows that we were a little off in our predictions. Several players have managed to break past the 7 streak bonus mark with 2 players reaching 7.5. This means that these players have won 5X 10 seated Sit’n'Gos in a row. Quite a respectable feat. Well done guys!

If there is any confusion still lingering about how the leaderboard points work and how the streak bonus affects your points, we have created a few tools to assist you. Simply go visit the Sit’n'Go leaderboard promo page on the Carbon website and use the calculators to work out how many points you should have!