I’ve been grinding 9-Man $5.50 and $6.50 Sit and Go’s on Stars for like 6 months and although I never really came close to busting out after playing 1000’s of these games, I also never really got to a point of crushing them like I thought I would by now.  I picked up some help in the form of a coach a couple of months ago and it really helped me find some big leaks in my game.  Additionally, I’ve learned that I tend to play differently as my bankroll varies in size.  I’ve never really been properly bankrolled to play even at these low buyin games of $6.50.  The concensus seems to be that you should have anywhere from 50 to 100 buyins to play at any given level seriously.  Since I started playing these games with $100 in my bankroll and never really got it to grow much past $300 (due to either running bad or taking money out for other things (another blog entry altogether)), I really never allowed myself the luxury of being properly rolled at the SnG’s. 

I’ll probably write another blog entry at some point about my experiences of being coached, but I’ll leave that for another time.  But I will say that my coach has tranformed himself into more of a MTT SnG player where he’s earned most of his (major by my standards) winnings in 18-Man SnG’s.  He has been kind of mentioning this to me since I 1st started talking to him.  And he’s finally worn me down to the point of giving some 18-Man’s a try.  So I tried a couple of $6.50 18-Man SnGs back in late April I guess it was and liked them immediately.  What a difference from the 9-Man’s I’d gotten used to!  There is a lot of different strategy that goes into these games vs. the Single Table variety and it was like starting to play for the 1st time again in many ways, which I found exciting!

Since the Variance in MTTs is typically much higher than the 9-mans, I figured I’d better move down to the $3.40 18-Mans and test the waters before risking an already inadequate bankroll.  Although the rake is higher at the $3.40’s, I’ve been told the games are (even) softer, and I was already comfortably bankrolled for this level. 

I played almost the entire month of May in these $3.40 18-Mans exclusively, with a remarkable almost 30% ROI (return on investment) until the very last weekend of the month when my ROI dipped down to around 20%.  But even so, this was a huge increase in the >10% ROI I had been earning at the 9-Man games.  And although I’m still dealing with a relatively small sample size, I can easily see that these games are waaaay +EV for me. 

I was going to talk about my shot at moving up to the $6.50 18-Man SnGs in this Entry, but I’ll save that for next time.  Until then,  Keeeeep Grindin’!!!

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