Strategy: Pivot Points

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is that makes my coaching style different from other approaches that I have seen advocated for learning sit and go’s. In sit and go coaching videos or on forums, you typically hear a coach say something along the lines of “Here is the situation… therefore here is my range.” Sit and go wizard is even worse, because it tells you essentially: “Here is the situation… therefore push this range” but unlike a good player SNG Wiz can not even be relied upon to accurately assess the situation and may give incorrect advice. Worse still misapplying the advice of coaches and SNG Wizard is a very common problem for students trying to improve their game. There is no telling whether the situation that the coach was discussing was common or whether their advice is broadly applicable. As a result many students develop a mishmash strategy that is many times filled with misconceptions about how to apply SNG theory in beating the games.

So as a struggling player how do you get better? What students need to do is to learn about specific situations that are important and repeat over and over again in SNG’s, then understand how to play that situation. By starting with very basic situations and very basic strategy many of the very large leaks in one’s game can be plugged. I call these situations pivot points because we learn basic ranges of hands for shoving, calling and restealing that work most of the time for very common situations, then as the player gets better, we learn how to adjust pivoting around the base range. Think of it as a boat that is anchored in the water. A tide or wind comes blowing the boat in a different direction but the boat is generally still in the same place, it has just adjusted to the situation.

One of how we use pivot points in SNGs i would be in calling an all-in shove from a loose shover. We develop a basic range that works based on very specific SNG Wizard examples but that generally fits the majority of situations. Let’s assume that we come up with a situation where a loose shover is shoving on us for a 5BB effective stack. It turns out that typically a “normal bad” player will shove about the top 35% of their range from the SB or Button when they have about 5BB. SNG wizard says that calling with a range of about Ax+,22+, any two suited Broadway cards, and KT+ is a pretty good range for calling. This becomes our pivot for calling a 5BB shove from a “normal bad” late position shover.

Pivot Rule: If a regular bad player shoves the SB or BTN for 5BB, call with Ax+,22+, ATSB, and KT+.

Is this rule always correct? Absolutely not. Is it correct the majority of the time… yes!!! And this is also what most beginner players struggling to beat the low limits need. By creating a set of rules that is correct the large percentage of the time I can take a losing player and get them winning immediately. What’s more, these pivots become the foundation for proper play as we learn to adjust them. Once a player is able to accurately articulate why they are using the pivot they then will naturally be able to start to add more information into the mix. Remember this pivot only works perfectly if the shover has a range of 35%. Let’s say for example now we realize that the shover is a regular at the games. Their stats and sharkscope indicate that they are a winning player. They are apt to be shoving much higher than 35% and so we can now see that adjusting our calling range wider because they are shoving wider is the correct direction to pivot. Given the same situation but now the shover reverts to being a bad player and we are on the bubble, we can see that pivoting to a tighter range is the correct move. Naturally the student begins to learn to adjust to the playing conditions. However many students tell me that they struggle making reads on opponents ranges. The real truth is that they don’t have a foundation to make that read from. The pivot point gives them a starting point to begin to apply situational dynamics.

One last thing to note. It does not take many pivot points to take a struggling or break even sit and go player and get them to be beating the lower limit games. If you think about it, a big mistake that happens very infrequently is not going to have as big an impact on your game as a small mistake that happens repeatedly many times per SNG. If a certain big mistake costs you 1% of the prize pool but that only happens once in 10 games, but you have a smaller mistake cost you .25% of the prize pool 4 times per game overall you are losing 10X as much equity from the small repeated mistake! (1% per 10 games is a mistake that costs 0.1% per game while .25%*4 per game costs 1% per game or 10X as much) By learning just a few pivots, players can easily plug 4-6 small leaks per game (maybe even more). Don’t forget that 1% of the prize pool is ~10% of your buyin and who wouldn’t like to improve their ROI by 10% or more per game???

Good Luck at the Tables,

Greg (+EV, positiveEV, zerosum79)