- In Double Up Sit & Gos, the top half of the field are paid out double the buy-in.
- “Double Up SNGs require a very advanced strategy to be successful in the long term, due to their unique prize structure,” reads the MPN statement.
Microgaming’s poker network MPN has issued a statement on its website warning new poker players that double-up Sit & Gos require players to adopt an unintuitive strategy, and recommends players new to the game try regular payout tournaments instead.
In Double Up Sit & Gos, often called Double or Nothing or DoN for short, the top half of the field are paid out double the buy-in. The flat payout structure can lead to unexpected strategies on and around the money “bubble.”
“Double Up SNGs require a very advanced strategy to be successful in the long term, due to their unique prize structure,” reads the MPN statement.
“Unlike most tournaments, the prize money is the same for every player who cashes, and this means that it doesn’t matter how many chips you have, as long as you make the money.”
“[I]t can be correct to play very tightly, and fold very strong hands that you would normally play. Ever noticed that people fold a lot in Double Ups? This is why,” it explains.
Instead, players are informed that they may fair better in regular 6-max Sit & Gos, where a variable payout structure leads to more natural play, it is argued.
Those who are interested in the double-up format are recommended to experiment with a calculator that uses the Independent Chip Model (ICM), a method of assigned dollar value to chips that takes into account the payout structure of the tournament.
Opening Lines
MPN, which acts as a network operator for dozens of poker rooms that share the same player pool, rarely issues such statements, and it is uncommon for any operator to warn players about game difficulty or hint at the correct strategy.
However, it is inline with a recent shift in a more open communication policy. It recently started a network blog; in its first post it explained that it does not, and will not, have a presence in public forums, but it wants to use the blog to open up lines of communication with its players.
The network is currently the 9th largest dot-com non-US online poker room, and 14th overall. It suffered a big set-back with the departure of Unibet, which knocked it out of the global top ten, but has since found some stability.
Double Up, and Down
Double-up tournaments were popularized by online poker behemoth PokerStars, which introduced the format under the title Double or Nothing in 2008. It has since been adopted by most major online poker rooms and proven a popular variant.
However, the discovery of large collusion ring in late 2010 raised questions of the format’s viability. PokerStars banned 49 Chinese players for participating in the scam, thought to be the largest in online poker history. 25,000 players were reimbursed a total of $2.1 million.
In February 2011, PokerStars killed the format, replacing it with the “Fifty50” format that varied the payout structure of half the player pool based on chip count. This change reduces the effects of implicit “soft-play” collusion, according to a PokerStars announcement at the time.
Its competitors continue to spread the DoN format.
