What is A SNG?

SNGs, or Sit and Go’s, are poker tournaments that do not have a scheduled start time and begin once all of the available seats at it are taken. Generally, SNGs are single table tournaments, ranging from anywhere from 2 to 10 players. Choosing a good SNG site is an important decision (as you will find out from reading this page). Below we have listed and ranked the best poker sites for Sit & Go tournaments.

Best SitnGo Poker Sites – United States Players

There are also multiple table SNGs, which start out with 3 or more tables, although you don’t see many beyond this. Since the whole idea of SNG tournaments is to get in them quicker and also have them end quicker, if the tournament field becomes too large, this may remove a lot of the advantages with SNGs.

So in all situations, SNGs will have a fairly predictable end time regardless of how well you do in it. This is in contrast with scheduled tournaments, which can last for many hours. Sit and go tournaments last for anywhere between 10 minutes on average to an hour, depending on the type and format.

This makes them a lot easier to plan around, as you may not have 4 or 5 hours to spend in a tournament, and you certainly would hate to have to leave while still in it. With SNGs, this never really is a worry.

In terms of how long it takes to enter a SNG, this depends a lot on how much SNG traffic a given poker site has, how popular the type of SNG that you’re looking to play is, and what time of day you’re looking to play them at.

Some SNGs are so popular that they fill up pretty instantly and you may even have to put your name in for them even before enrollment starts, as a sort of waiting list for them. There are others that never actually fill up, as they never get the amount of players needed and the people sitting at them end up leaving.

Or, there may be no one at all enrolling at all in them. At some sites, some SNGs, especially the higher stakes ones, never get anyone playing them ever. So just because SNGs offer the opportunity for quick starts, this doesn’t mean that they always start that way.

However, quicker is not always better, and some of the easiest SNGs to beat may be among the slower starting ones. Sometimes you may have to wait a half hour or more for one to fill up, but that SNG might be much easier to beat than some other ones that fill up much quicker.

There may even be some poker sites that don’t have enough action for you in themselves, but what action they do have is very profitable, so what some savvy players do is have accounts at several of these sites, to ensure that they have access to the best and juiciest SNGs available at any given time.

This becomes more wise as you move up the stakes, and at the highest stakes you are definitely going to want and need to have access to all of the good SNG poker sites to make sure you never miss out on the best action.

A lot of today’s biggest online pros got their start with SNGs, eventually building up their bankroll through playing these small tournaments to the point where they could start playing high stakes cash games. So SNGs are a great place to start and is easily the best format if you are looking to move up stakes and climb the ranks.

Since SNGs have the lowest variance, or bankroll downward swings, of any type of online poker, once you become profitable, you can safely move up stakes with SNGs more quickly. So with those who are aware of this phenomenon, this is a big benefit, as we are able to achieve our ultimate poker goals of playing for higher stakes faster and with more certainty.

Types Of SNG

There are several things that you need to choose when it comes to deciding which type of SNG that you want to play. The first consideration is what stake, or buy in level, you will be choosing. This will depend on both your level of skill and the size of your bankroll.

If you are new to SNGs or to poker in general, it’s usually a good idea to start at the bottom, the lowest stakes offered, and then work your way up. Once you can beat the stake that you are at consistently, and have enough of a bankroll to play the next higher one, then it may be worth a shot.

A big mistake that some players make is to think that moving up stakes is some sort of permanent thing, and then cause themselves way too much damage if it turns out that they are not ready for that higher stake. On the other hand, some other players may spend far too long at their current buy in level, being too timid to even try out the next higher stake, or thinking that they are making this move once and for all and therefore need to be very sure.

When looking to move up, it’s always best to see this as just taking a shot at the higher level, and then err on the side of caution when it comes to staying there or moving back. If you are not ready for it yet, it certainly is a good idea to back off and take another shot at it later once you are more experienced and therefore more ready.

Aside from that, there are numerous other variations of SNG’s, including choosing the type of game you will play, for instance Texas Holdem or Omaha, the size of the table, meaning heads up, shorthanded, full ring, or multi table, and the speed of the blinds, meaning regular speed, turbo, super turbo, and so on.

Depending on which SNG poker site you are playing on, there may be some other choices for you to make as well, for instance a lot of sites have things like a double or nothing format where the tournament ends once half the table is gone, as well as other variations designed to add more variety and excitement to the game.

So whatever you choose, it’s important that you pick something that you both enjoy and are good at. These tournaments can be a heck of a lot of fun, and there are a lot of different choices you can make, so it’s probably good to try out a bunch of them to see where your real interest lies.

Smallest SNG Buyin/Largest SNG Buyin

The smallest SNGs offered are of course the free ones, however these play money tournaments are very poor instruments to train people to play real money poker. So I’d avoid these at all costs as they will just end up developing some real bad habits, and as soon as you can play real money poker, you should do so.

As far as the real money SNGs go, just about every SNG site has some nice low stakes for you to try out, usually starting at about $1. While you may see some smaller buy ins at some SNG sites, this is about as low as I’d recommend anyone going.

Even a very small deposit like $20 will get you 18 of these once the fees are taken out, which means a lot of play for your money. You can lose the same $20 pretty quickly at the cash tables, even at the lower stakes, so this is another reason why SNGs are a great place for newer and smaller bankrolled players to start with.

As you progress at SNGs, you will have the opportunity to move up stakes, and SNG poker sites that we recommend offer a wide variety of buy in sizes. So for instance you could move up to $2, $5, $10, $20, $30, $50, $100, $200, and above.

You can even work your way up to the real high stakes which are $5000 and above. Imagine making $5000 in a matter of a few minutes! So as you can see there is lots of room for growth here with SNGs, and how far you go is simply up to you.

Where Is The Best SNG Traffic?

A lot of players, particularly those who aren’t really in the know, but a lot of experienced players as well, think that they need to be playing at the poker sites with the most SNG traffic. This view is mistaken though.

For starters, if you want to play a SNG, and there is one available that fills up quickly, then you have succeeded in your objective. The fact that these tables fill up in one second rather than a minute isn’t really a big deal, and in fact, it can be more difficult and frustrating to get a seat at the super busy sites.

So the amount of SNG traffic that we need can be defined as “enough,” so that’s the kind of sites we should be looking at, and is something that our recommended SNG sites have.

As is the case with cash games, it’s not just about how much traffic there is, it’s also about how easy the players are to beat, and we’ve accounted for both in our recommendations that we have for you.

Progressive Jackpot SNGs

Progressive jackpot SNG’s can be a real windfall for players if they are lucky enough to hit the jackpot, but what I really love about these isn’t the jackpot itself, it’s all the extra bad players that these SNGs tend to attract.

So if you are looking for the fishiest SNG games around, the first thing you do is pick an fishy SNG site, then you pick the fishiest SNGs that run there, which are very often the jackpot games. This is more for smaller stakes players, but if there is a jackpot game running at your stake, as a general rule you should be playing them.

Rake In SNGs

As is the case with all tournaments, they aren’t raked like cash games, but you pay a fee to the poker site to play in a real money tournament. So for instance, you will see the buy ins listed as something like $10 + $1, where the $10 is what goes into the prize pool, and the $1 is the fee.

As a general rule, SNG fees are similar to scheduled tournaments, with fees generally being 10% of the buy in amount. With heads up SNGs, the fees are generally half of this. At the smallest buy ins, the fees sometimes are larger, and at the higher stakes, they often are smaller.

There really isn’t a great deal of difference across SNG sites and like cash game rake, this has all been pretty much standardized. As is the case with rake, it’s never what you pay in rake, it’s how well you do net of it, meaning how much you win or lose in total at one site versus another. This means that the easier sites to make money at will be much better for you regardless, so that’s what you need to be focusing on here, and is what we focus on for you in our recommendations.

Are SNGs Profitable To Play?

SNGs can be very profitable to play once you learn enough to be able to beat the games. Like cash games though, you not only have to be above average in ability at them, you need a big enough advantage to overcome the fees, and from that point, your surplus advantage becomes your profit.

There are a great many players who make a good living playing SNGs, and many more who supplement their income nicely with them. The amount of success you have at them will come down primarily to playing at the best SNG sites. We are not exaggerating when we tell you this is by far the most important component of making money at SNGs.

So we’ve done all the work for you here, so just click on one of our recommended SNG sites to put our expertise to work for you and get a real head start on SNG success!