Jennifear’s Sit&Go strategy

You know how it goes. We play tournaments online, we invariably make mistakes, ignore optimal plays, and miss good opportunities. These gaffes become ingrained and morph into money-losing reflexes: folding instead of shoving, calling instead of folding, shoving out of desperation. It’s virtually impossible for us to change our own patterns and evolve into winning players without help. The reality of this has helped to make the player known as Jennifear into one of poker’s most in-demand leak-busters. 

Among people who are serious about winning, few coaches earn the respect paid to Jennifear, who offers private lessons for sit-and-gos and MTTs via her site, www.jennifear.com. She made a name for herself through incisive, mathematically astute postings on pocketfives.com and has emerged as a guru of exploiting statistical edges. Not only can she do it – playing under the name PunkinBear, she has a 27% ROI on PokerStars – but she can show you how to as well.

Clearly, she loves analysing other people’s play and her conclusions are generally spot on. But the mysterious Jennifear has no verbal interaction with her clients and communicates exclusively via email or instant message. This may not be the most convenient system, but the fact that she has a list of players awaiting her wisdom is evidence of how much she can do to enhance a student’s EV.

To get a little taste of what she does, we contacted Jennifear and asked for a lesson in SNG strategy. And though the bulk of her tutelage is tailored to a specific player’s needs and weaknesses (see opposite), she also laid down a few rules that any player would do well to learn from…

VALUE IS A RELATIVE THING

‘The most important thing for single-table sit-and-go players to understand is that all chips are not created equally. Some chips are worth more than others. Win a ten-man SNG and you finish with ten times as many chips as you started with – but you only win five times your buy-in. This means that the chips you risk always have more value than the chips you stand to gain, except when it gets to heads-up at the end. It’s therefore important to start with a strategy where you play fewer hands in early position than you would in a cash game, and be very careful what hands you play when facing a raise.
As you get deeper into the game, the disparity between the value of the chips you risk and the chips you stand to gain gets even greater. If you are in second or third place on the bubble, you’ll need to have a huge hand in order to play against a raise from the big stack.’

SOMETIMES YOU SHOULD 

MUCK ACE-KING‘To fold A-K, you have to find a spot where the chips you risk are worth more than twice what the chips you stand to gain are worth. These situations are surprisingly common. In a nine-man SNG, look for spots where you’re second or third in chips on the bubble, with a very short stack present, facing a shove by someone who has you covered. Chances are you will need a hand that is a 70% favourite in order to break even. A-K won’t do that job. In a 45-man final table, or even at the final table of an MTT, if you have the second or third biggest stack at a full table and the chip leader puts you all-in, you’ll need to win around 70-75% of the time just to break even.’ 

LEVERAGE YOUR LEAD

‘Having the chip lead gives you tremendous leverage against the middle stacks on the bubble. When you shove, even if you are shoving any two cards and they know it, they are often forced to fold hands as strong as 7-7 or A-Q. While many players are unaware that they have to play this tightly at times, and might call you in these spots with as little as A-7 or even K-9 suited, they still have a fear of not cashing. You will win enough uncontested pots to really turn up the heat and shove very, very wide in most situations.’

DON’T GO FOR SECOND‘The prize structure of an SNG greatly favours first and third-place finishers. In a typical $10 ten-man SNG with a $50/$30/$20 prize structure, a player who gets one first-place finish and one third-place finish makes $10 more than a player who gets two second-place finishes. So, it’s worth going all out and playing for first, even at the risk of busting in third. Balancing this is a matter of shoving wide and calling tight near the bubble. Once in the money, if you have the second-biggest stack, start shoving wide. You’re going to get $30 for coming second if you do nothing. But you can take down $20 more if you win, while only risking $10 to get there. In short, don’t put a lot of value on second place and go for the win!’

ANATOMY OF A CLINIC WITH JENNIFEAR

Sign up for a Jennifear tutorial and you begin by sending her a few of your tournament hand histories. What she does is analyse your play, find the spots where you are messing up, and provide details on how to improve. The degree
to which she can hit the bullseye is eerie. Even spookier is her ability to scrutinise your SharkScope charts (with finishing positions) and tell you at what point in a tournament you play incorrectly. 

After looking at my 90-man SNG results, she said, ‘With 45 to 60 players left, press more hands. It seems that you are lost between 12 and 20 big blinds, so you just nit up and get tight. This causes you to fall to less than average. Then you need to shove or you’ll run out of chips.’

She’s exactly right, and she gleaned that much just from inspecting my results on SharkScope (the hand histories I sent
her were first and second-place finishes, so in those cases I ran well and there was no nitting). Her advice, generally speaking, is for me to shove more (rather than tightening up) and to take advantage of fold equity while I still have it.

Most instructive of all was the live conversation we had via instant messaging. She further analysed my play, drilled down on specific hands and provided the links to some of her favourite poker tools. Then she showed me how to use them. There’s nothing like watching Jennifer dissecting a single hand. She goes deeper in evaluating seven cards than I could even consider. It was a humbling, inspiring and highly instructive experience.