[PinkSteel]

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I love how all of us think that SNGs are the easiest to beat...yet there has to be a whole ton of people not on this forum losing piles of money playing us. I think i'd like to hear what a cash game player has to say about this subject. If they said that SNGs were the easiest, I would defintely think they're retarded for not playing them ahhaha.

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I've been a cash game player, mostly Party $25NL, since about January when I decided to focus on that. Before that I donked around for a few months in all types of games. I've returned to SNGs for a while to hopefully rebuild some bankroll.

I'm sure others have different experiences and there's no canned answer, but my observations have been:

For me at least, SNGs seem easiest to play. As has been noted, there are more variables at work with the blind structure and field thinning from 10 to 2, so that means more opportunities for mistakes, for people who don't at least appreciate all the dimensions and variables.

Furthermore, it feels like downside is substantially more limited in SNGs. They're like buying an option: your total loss is limited, but you have substantial upside. No-limit cash games are like a bottomless pit when you're tilting or running bad.

6-max is a game of reading opponents. I suck at it and I hate it. Hand ranges can be very wide, because the game is short-handed, and trickery can run rampant. Because it's not a tournament the blind structure is at least fixed, but the multi-dimensionality of 6-max is in your opponents, and personally I handle rule- and game-structure- variables much better than people variables. Good shorthanded cash game players rule the roost -- see the Mid-High NL forum.

Full ring cash is a game of patience, discipline, and stinginess. A lot of stinginess. You're waiting for the big kill in cash games, and in full ring you may wait a long, long time. It's the money that you save on 95% of your hands that accounts for profitability as much as the money you make on the 5%. So if you like to mix it up, if you get bored, if you like to take fliers -- you can bleed to death quickly at full ring.

I played full ring and learned the party line on the SSNL forum, it's excellent. When I played a disciplined, focused, tight game, and curbed all my desires to look people up, I made money. But online, it's a tough, tough game. I got bored for a couple of months and experimented with a LAG style, and promptly erased all my gains from the prior 6 months.

Maybe there are just a lot more fish playing tourneys. Like I said, they're options on a big ticket, and options of all varieties are largely for suckers. Excepting the people -- like those who read and post here -- who take such tourneys seriously, there are probably a lot of people who take comfort in knowing that "it's only 11 bucks."