Double or Nothing SNGs and Variance

Single Table Tournaments / Marcus Bateman / 13 July 2010 / Leave a Comment

Double or Nothings can allow you to play out of a shorter bankroll than other formats of Sit and Go, which makes them a great format to start trying to work up a bankroll from freerolls or a small deposit.

A relatively new addition to the sit and go scene, the Double or Nothing sit and go provides one of the most useful and low variance ways of starting up a bankroll. Usually played either six or ten handed, these tournaments simply run until half the field have been eliminated, at which point the remainder of the field is paid out double their initial buy in.

Any time money is paid out to a large portion of the field in poker tournaments, the short term variance involved is reduced massively. To illustrate quite why this is true, imagine the difference between a ten handed tournament that paid out only first place (winner take all), and a ten handed tournament that paid out nine players the minute the first one busted, and you can see how severely short term variance is affected by player numbers.

In the first case, a winning player could easily go twenty or thirty tournaments without cashing if luck was against them; where as in the second case this is close to a statistical impossibility. Because of this, Double or Nothings can allow you to play out of a shorter bankroll than other formats of Sit and Go, which makes them a great format to start trying to work up a bankroll from freerolls or a small deposit.

They also generally attract a quite low standard of player, who think of them as a basic survival exercise (which although part of the strategy it is far from the whole picture), who provide an enormous amount of dead money in the games - again reducing variance through making the fields softer than the average Sit and Go. This dual combination of factors makes them one of the easiest games to beat - both in terms of the players you are up against, as well as the overall variance structure.

It is often hard to spin up small amount of money in poker simply because most of the games have enough variance that you will often go broke trying to work up enough to cover the buy ins adequately. Double or Nothings provide a near perfect game to attack if you are just starting out with a small amount on Betfair Poker - and their blend of low variance and weak players has started many a bankroll since their inception.

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