SitnGoWiz
This Calculator Assist Tool Will Bring a New Understanding to your SitnGo Tournament Game
Reviewed by BaddBeatBobb
You can hear more of his opinions at TournamentIndicatorForum.com
Have you ever dreamed of playing a perfect short stack strategy? Unless you’re Annette_15, you just might find yourself on a short stack from time to time in a Sit’n’Go. What do you do with that thing? If you’ve read strategy articles, or watched Marty’s free video series, you know you pretty much have two options: push or fold. Unfortunately, short stack aggression is a tricky problem. When do I push? When do I fold? Equity calculations account for the risks vs the benefits and give probabilistically correct plays, but they are too cumbersome to aid live play. Is there a solution?
Enter the SitNGo Wizard. This software is able to boil down complex end game hands into a basic preflop push or fold decisions for you. It takes into account your position at the table, the number of players still in the game, your stack size, the size of the blinds, and the total number of chips in play. It also takes into account all pre-flop actions up to the point where it is your turn to act. It can analyze any number of limpers, raisers and callers, and it can analyze up to 3 all-in players. This is a very helpful feature, because who hasn’t had to agonize about being third into the pool, on the bubble, preflop, with AQs?
The Wizard is able to upload hand histories for analysis. It currently supports Party, Stars, FT, UB, Absolute, and the OnGame Network. The developer is open to supporting other sites, contingent on customer demand. You can load all the hands from a SnG into the program and get a hand-by-hand analysis of your actions. For any given hand, the Wizard will calculate your push equity and your fold equity. These equities are expressed as a percentage of the total prize pool, so actual dollar amounts are irrelevant. It also calculates a safety edge. If your E(push)-E(fold) > Edge, a push is recommended. If a fold is correct, the wizard states what hand range would be required in the given situation to change its recommendation to a push. One weird artifact of the software is that it offers push/fold suggestions even for early hands when your stack is large relative to the blinds. However, it also posts a warning message that pushing would risk more than 10 big blinds.
SitnGo Wiz has an array of charts, table, graphs and quizzes to test your knowledge and review your strategy.
A large part of how the Wizard makes its recommendations is by assigning calling ranges to the opponents who have to act behind you. These ranges are based on the Sklansky-Karlson ratings. For instance, the opponent may be assigned a fairly tight calling range, meaning that only a top 10% SK hand will induce a call. The Wizard is flexible, however. You can very easily override the modeled hand range if you happen to know your opponent is tighter or looser than the range suggested. You can even assign a range of exclusion. Suppose an opponent has limped in, and you’re reasonably sure this particular opponent is not tricky and would have raised with a very strong hand. You can exclude hands from the highest SK ranges and assign a middle range of likely holdings with which the opponent might call an all-in preflop. Changing calling ranges significantly changes the Wizard’s recommendations, and the developer advises users to view ranges assigned by the model with skepticism. The paying user could just as easily wonder why a $99.00 program doesn’t have better opponent modeling, but it is refreshing that the Wizard supporting documents are honest about the software’s limitations.
A very convenient feature of the Wizard is that, for a loaded tourney, you can use the “Tournament View” to get a brief overview of every single hand. The Wizard highlights hands where it analyzes your plays as incorrect or questionable, so you needn’t go through every single hand laboriously. The Wizard also allows a scenario to be constructed. For brick-and-mortar poker players, this allows post-game analysis of critical hands on a short stack.
The best feature of the Wizard is the quiz mode. It’s terrific to analyze plays you already made, but to be prepared for next time, you need to have sharp intuitions. The Wizard’s quiz mode generates random scenarios and asks you to make a choice about whether to open-push, fold, or call someone else’s all-in. For hands where you make an incorrect choice, you can view the Wizard’s analysis. Think of it like an infinite supply of flash-cards to drill your short-stack play. If that sounds like too much effort, consider that there are a lot of cash-hungry players out there who are making the effort and will be only too happy to take advantage of your unpreparedness, using tools like the Wizard. Yes, I believe the quiz mode represents a genuine edge. In poker, edge equals dollars.
For those users who want to improve their play but find all the mathematics intimidating, the Wizard has a self-contained tutorial to guide you through how to use the software and how it works. There is a 17 minute introductory video on the Wizard’s home page is at www.sngwiz.com. For readers of this review who would like a deeper look at the Wizard’s functionality, I strongly recommend the free video, which will walk you through all the program’s features.
So, did you just bust out of an online STT? Load it into the Wizard and see whether your play had equity. Are you wondering about a push or fold decision from the home game last Sunday night? Recreate the hand in the wizard and let it analyze the play. Do you want to improve your end-game decision-making? Drill yourself with randomly generated quiz hands. The developer offers a 30 day unlimited use license, so you can definitely try before you buy. There is also a further no questions asked 90 day money-back guarantee, so the risks appear minimal.
BaddBeatBobb’s Final Grade: A
Software Review: SitNGo Wizard As Your Personal Poker Tournament Coach.
By Marty Smith
My friends and I started out learning poker by playing sit and go tournaments. It was a great way to learn about tournaments, blinds structure and aggression while not bleeding your whole deposit in a couple hours. We actually use to pride ourselves on how long it would be until we had to reload! Playing very tight a few years ago was actually the thing to do to make money.
Or at least not lose money. When you are learning poker strategy that is especially crucial.
Super rock tight isn’t exactly the best way to play sit and go tournaments these days, because there are a lot of educated players now that use poker calculator tools that really help their game and vastly improve critical decision making. Now wouldn’t it be great to have a system or training tool that can help you with those types of decisions?
There is software now that along with your Tournament Indicator poker calculator can really add some in-depth skills and analysis to your sit and go poker game. It’s called SitNGo Wizard. It’s an analysis tool that allows for importing and dissection of your tournament hand histories. Why would you need this? Well for starters, many players simply do not comprehend and adjust for the prize structure and rising blinds in sit and go tournaments, thus leading to less than optimal play at critical stages of the tournament. This leads to another reason for self analysis; Less than optimal play will cost you money or at least, opportunity loss in the long run.
Think of SitNGo Wizard as a personal coach for improving your strategy for single table tournaments. This is the kind of coach that tells you what to do before and after the game and has the capability to review your game plays and let you know what you did right or wrong. Sooner or later, your coach is going to have an effect on you and your bankroll.
For the dedicated rounder SitNGo Wizard has different features that help you improve your game. Including a sit and go tutorial, create a game for analysis, import hand history for complete tournament analysis, and a quiz mode that throws out hand after hand of push, fold or call questions. These features also display graphically, so you are not hunkered down trying to read note-pad style hand histories. A quick glance is all would take to absorb the quiz, and then you get to choose an option. The questions just keep on coming, and at first you are likely going to be shocked at how little you know when making the right decisions in higher blind stages.
I have often remarked about poker calculator software that really goes beyond presenting basic odds calculations. These days you need software like SitNGo Wizard that makes you think differently about your game. SitNGo Wizard is easy to install and use and there are several helpful tutorials available too.
Marty Smith reviews all online poker calculators and software so you know what you are getting into before you buy one. He also offers a free video series to improve your sit an go poker game.
Poker Sit And Go Report-The Real Differences Between 6 And 9 Seated Sit And Go Tournaments
You can join my FREE sit and go video series and learn how to start building a bankroll playing online poker.
My free sit and go video strategy series often is the source of great questions from those who have signed up. While viewers actually do learn from the videos they also send me questions or comments that make me think about my game even more. Hence, while my goal was helping them, they in turn are helping me as well.
A case in point is where the question arose as to why I play more 6 seated sit and go tournaments than I do 9 seated. In fact I don't play more, but for the purposes of my videos, they are quicker to sift through for hand analysis. However, it brings up a good point because there definitely differences between the two size tournaments. Enough to take note for sure.
The odds of you making the money in 6 and 9 seated tournaments are exactly the same, being 1 in 3, but by virtue of the speed of (less) player action, you will get to see more hands in a 6 seated sit and go tournament. This is good news if you are a tight aggressive rounder type player, because being dealt more hands means the distribution of playable situations this is an advantage.
6 seated tournaments also attract more reckless and care-free players looking for some sort of quick fix. They want to see action and will often get it in the form of getting kicked out early, or doubling up, further exposing you to more hands, and subsequently - quality hands. Just as you expect to see early all-in, and out exits in 9 seated tournaments, there are too in 6 seated! Apparantly a short table isn’t fast enough for a lot of players!
Here is another thing. The 9 seated tournaments attract more lions - the solid type of poker players that are difficult to gets chips from. They will hang around patiently until the blinds escalate quite larger than 6 seated. It is quite normal to be heads-up in a 6 seated tourney with the blinds at 50 and 100! In a heads-up situation in a 9 seated tourney you may find yourself facing blinds of 240 and 480 just to start!. Hence, I find that when 4 players are left in a 9 seated tourney, you are much more likely to be against good players who really know the true value of their hole cards in a late game scenario. Most hands will result in all-in face-offs, making it more of a bingo game to see who finishes first. These are just some things to consider.