Poker: Tournaments, Cash Games or Sit N Go’s?

This is the most common question for beginners in poker. When you start to play poker you have millions of options of different types of games you can play.
In the following article i’ll shed some light about favorite types of the poker game, why they are great and what i think you should play.
First of all, we ll have a look from the financial perspective. If you are playing just for fun, play whatever you want, play what is more fun to you and what enjoy you the most.
But if we approaching this from a financial perspective it would be beneficial to find the game that will bring you the maximum amount of money.

Cash games

In my opinion cash games provide the largest edge, have the least amount of variance and the most consistency of income for a winning player.
I mean, Multi Table Tournaments (MTT) and Sit N Go’s feature a lot of allin situations which are frequently 50/50 (flips) situations where you can’t control the outcome. Thus the edge you generally can gain is less than in cash games on a per game/per hand basis. Cash game players will have a higher percentage of winning sessions and the income
is a lot more consistent if you are a winning player. However, its definitely possible to make consistent profits in MTT’s and SNG’s, it just requires that you have to play a huge volume of games.
Furthermore the number of successful cash game players who make lots of money are greater than tournament players and Sit N Go players who make similar money. Far more people have the ability to make lots of money playing cash games than any other form of game.
The Summary is, the skills you learn in cash games will help you even in MTT tournaments. If you take all the top cash game players in the world they are all great in tournaments as well.
But if you take some tournament specialists, more or less they wont be the best cash game players or could lack the skills necessary to beat deepstack cash games.

Multi Table Tournaments

Playing Tournaments is probably the second favourite way to make money in poker. The reason for this, the edge in MTT’s is greater than you will find in Sit N Go’s. Top SNG players will
have a ROI(Return On Investment) of approximately 10% or less. Top MTT players can have ROI’s of greater than 100%. The variance is still greater in MTT’s than cash games but you will find plenty of MTT players online who put in enough volume to overcome this variance.

Sit N Go’s

Fewer and fewer recreational players are playing Sit N Go’s. The games are almost solved. And the edge a Sit N Go player has is minimal, especially if he is sitting at a table full of regular players.
On the other hand there are still opportunities outside the standard realm of Sit N Go’s. Heads up Sit N Go’s offer a greater edge for better players and the newer “double or nothing” Sit N Go’s seem to be attracting more poor players than the standard format.
In the end all of the examples in this article were about Texas Holdem games. Because of the influx of training/coaching material over the past few years, the games are definitely getting harder everywhere.
But actually there is a lot less training material about Pot Limit Omaha and several other poker games. For that reason, i would seriously suggest you to learn other games apart from Texas Holdem because they provide opportunities to make profit which don’t exist now in Holdem games.