Sit and go

A sit and go is a tournament with no scheduled start time: registration opens, and play begins the moment every seat is filled. Most are single-table events of six to nine players, and for a long time they were where online tournament players learned the mathematics of the game.

Because the field size is fixed and small, sit and gos are the most mathematically tractable tournaments there are: the payout structure is known in advance, ICM applies from early on, and push-fold play decides most of the outcome. That made them the first format to be studied seriously with equity models.

Variants multiplied over time — turbo and hyper-turbo blind speeds, knockout formats, and the three-handed lottery games whose prize pool is drawn at random when the table fills.

How the format works

The defining feature is the fixed, known field. A nine-player sit and go always has nine players and always pays the same places in the same proportions, usually three. Nothing about the structure depends on how many people happen to register, which is the opposite of a scheduled multi-table tournament where the field, the prize pool and the number of paid places are all unknown until late registration closes.

That predictability is why the format became the laboratory of tournament study. With the payouts fixed in advance, the chip-to-money relationship can be calculated rather than estimated.

Why ICM and push-fold grew out of sit and gos

In a tournament, chips are not money: doubling a stack does not double its cash value, because the prize pool is shared among the surviving players. The independent chip model puts a number on that relationship, and a single-table sit and go is the simplest possible place to apply it - a known field, a known payout ladder, and a small enough number of outcomes to compute.

The practical consequence is that sit and gos collapse, quite quickly, into one decision. Once blinds have risen relative to the stacks, most hands are either a shove or a fold, and the correct choice can be solved rather than guessed. Push-fold charts exist because this format made them worth building. A player who learns the format properly ends up with the equity intuition that carries over into every other tournament they play.

The bubble is the whole game

Because three of nine players are paid, the four-handed stage dominates results. Survival is worth a great deal to a short stack and almost nothing to a big one, so the big stack can apply pressure that is unprofitable to resist. This asymmetry is the single most valuable thing the format teaches, and it is the reason that a player who is good at the bubble beats players who are better at poker in the ordinary sense.

Variants

The format multiplied as online rooms iterated on it. Turbo and hyper-turbo blind structures compress the same tournament into a fraction of the time, which pushes the push-fold stage earlier and raises variance. Knockout and bounty versions move part of each buy-in onto the players' heads. Multi-table sit and gos keep the start-when-full principle across several tables. And the three-handed lottery formats, sold under various names by different rooms, draw the prize pool at random when the table fills - a different game in everything but name, where the multiplier does more to shape strategy than the cards do.

Where the format stands now

Sit and gos no longer dominate online traffic the way they did; scheduled tournaments and the fast lottery formats took much of the volume. They remain the cleanest way to learn tournament mathematics, and the clearest example of a format whose strategy was effectively solved by study rather than by feel.