Mastering Sit and Goes - Middle Portion

There are five basic stages to every sit and go, table selection, beginning play, middle portion, late portion and the endgame. By mastering all five stages of sit and goes, you should be able to sit down at any of these tables, and walk away with a profit the majority of the time.

This section, the third of 5, will cover what to do during the middle portion of sit and goes, when one or two people have been eliminated, and the blinds are on their second or third level.

Your main objective for this stage is to accumulate chips so that you can be a dominant force in the later rounds. However, by this time the blinds are usually high enough that you can't splash around with just any hand and hope to catch a great flop to bust someone. In this stage, you should limit yourself to relatively solid hands, but play them very aggressively. The reason for this is that by this time, a lot of people are starting to feel the pinch due to poor play earlier, and are no longer willing to throw away second rate hands. They will pay off with hands such as top pair, bad kicker, or two pair when there is an obvious flush on the board. They are also not likely to throw away blinds in this stage, so preflop raises with good hands are valuable.

Knowing this information what sort of hands should you play? Obviously any high pair, Jacks or 10's, or better is a preflop raise, and usually a reraise. An AK is usually worth a reraise, definitely if it is suited. Hands such as AQ, AJ, A10 are worth limping from middle position, early if you don't think you will be raised, and are worth raising from late position. KQ and QJs are good limping hands, but you should be prepared to toss them if you run into strong action. Middle pairs, 77, 88, 99 are worth limping, but dump them if you don't hit a set or have an over pair on the flop.

Poor hands are ones such as 10-9 suited, or A-x. These are hands that are more likely to get you in trouble at this stage if you only hit one of your cards, and the blinds are too high to try and hit both your cards to bust someone.

If you are going to do well at this stage you sometimes need to throw away good hands, even if you have already invested lots of money. You need to be careful against check raises, they are rarely bluffs except from tricky players, who hopefully you have identified by now. All ins are almost never bluffs at this stage, and you should be very careful about calling one with less than top pair, excellent kicker.

If you do have to toss a good hand, and have a low chip stack, say around 1/2 what you started with, don't be too worried, there is still time to rebuild. Generally at this stage you can wait out another two round or so, looking for a good starting hand, before you need to think about pushing in with any ace or a hand like KQ. ( As a side note, I would much rather push in with KQ than Ace Rag. With KQ you probably have two live cards against a caller, Ace Rag has a good chance of being dominated.)

Additionally in this stage you should be observing the other players carefully. See if any of them are changing their styles now that players have been eliminated. See if you can taunt any players to put them on tilt. One tournament I was playing, I put 3 players on tilt by typing ' command/execute/holecards-peek.exe ' into the chat window. They thought that I was using a software to cheat and could see their hole cards, and from then on always folded whenever I raised a pot.

To view the other section of my sit n go strategy go here

1) Playing Sit and Go's --- End Game

2) Mastering Sit and Go's - Late Portion

3) Mastering Sit and Go's - Middle Portion

4) Mastering Sit and Go's - Beginning Play

5) Mastering Sit and Go's - Table Selection