Moving "All In" is an overused tool in the SNG

Don't fall into the trap of thinking this will get you out of trouble.

You need to pick your hands to play. This much we know.

But what happens when we miss the flop completely, make a continuation bet and get called?

Now we have to think that our opponent has a decent hand to beat us with.

Blinds are 20/40 and seat three smells dinner burning.

Of course he or she could be on a draw and you can read the board to try and work this out.

It's not usual for your high hand to be beat if you having been sitting waiting patiently for a hand. It's much more common for someone to be drawing to a hand to beat you.

The problem with moving "all in" in this game is that if you are wrong or your opponent has caught a piece of the flop then you are going to get looked up and eliminated from the tournament.

When you read a poker text book very often they will talk about "making a read" and "putting your opponent on a hand".

In this online SNG it's just nigh on impossible to do this. You've only been playing against them for a few minutes, you have absolutely no idea what type of hands they are prepared to play with and whether they are a good or bad player.

You just don't have the time to make these judgements as you would if you were sitting across from someone for hours in a "live" tournament.

It's a $10 (or $20 game, the skill level difference is negligible) and so you are not up against players who can fold a half decent hand. They will just push in.

Mostly you are up against tournament players waiting for their next tourney and trying their hand or cash game players who can't find a table or got bored and fancied a change.

This is why moving all in with nothing to try and push someone off of their medium pair is such a bad play. You will get looked up all day long.

The only time you should be making "all in" moves is when you are in a desperate spot towards the end of the SNG and you want to make sure you see all five cards without being bet off of the flop. Or you are confident you have the best hand on the bubble and don't want to see a flop.

The only exception of course is when you have made the nut flush or straight and want to try and extract the maximum chips for your hand. But this is not often in this game because we don't play drawing hands very often.

Moving "all in" is the terrible players weapon in this game and you will constantly see them moving all in and getting busted out or getting lucky all through the game.

The only time you want to be making a legitimate all in move is when there is an obvious draw on the board like a flush and you have an overpair to the board. In this case you have to stop your opponent getting to the river and making their hand and an all in play is justified here if the pot is big enough to warrant it.

Even so, a better play in this situation is to check it down.

If it's a brick we pick up the smaller pot with no risk. If it's the flush we can check it down. Sure occasionally we will get bluffed off of the pot with your opponent making an "all in" move but this is the nature of the game and you have to accept it.

More often than not you will hold the best hand when someone tries to move all in and steal the pot. This is why it's important to play the patience game and wait for premium hands to play.

An awful lot of the time you will pick up top pair with top kicker with your opponent making weaker and weaker bets at you until finally they push all in knowing they can't win the pot.

It's extremely unlucky to find someone who made a set against you. More often than not it's a busted draw.

However it's still not a good idea to call these all in moves unless you have top pair or two pair. Often they move in on you with a middle pair.

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