The only thing good about this is you get to practice against a larger stack. With his 1600-2400 against your 800, you should still be good enough to take him by the end of the game. Maybe sooner.

If folks think the players in the $5+1 games are bad, imagine how bad the players are playing for free? If they were any good, they’d try to win money.

Spend a few hours to days down in the play money SNG area. Once you are winning, or finishing top 3 just about every time, except when you take a bad beat, then you are ready to move up and make some money.

That is how I advise cutting your teeth. Read the rest of this book, and then hit the play money area. If you win your first 3 or 4 SNG’s, you know it’s time to move up.

The competition gets a lot stiffer, and the players a lot tighter, the more you move up.

A friend of mine got sick of playing the lower buy-in games because the play was still so erratic. So, he tried out, just for fun, the $200+20 table. Everything he did on that table made sense. He would raise to get someone out of the pot, and they would fold. He’d represent something, and folks at the $200 would respect that, and bow out to fight again later.

At the lower levels, SOMEONE will almost always call you to “keep you honest”. Playing the $200 SNG’s, he won 3 times that first day and was up over 2 grand.

I am not saying to go straight to the big money because it’s an easier game. It’s a more “predictable” game. At the $5 level, you still have a lot of fish, and they will catch crappy hands against you. There are a lot of rules to live by at the lower levels that you don’t need to apply at the higher levels.

But, hey, it’s only a $6 entry fee, and an hour later, you could have $25 to show for it. That’s $19 per hour. If you could do it every time, you’d have yourself a nice little side job.

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