Dominate Sit and Gos with Table Ninja

A lot of the success of playing small field tournaments is playing them in bulk, one after the other, and opening a ton of them simultaneously.  All serious grinders will tell you that one major requirement is that you need Table Ninja if you play on PokerStars and TableNinjaFT if you play on Full Tilt Poker.  You’ll be able to automate a lot of the tasks at the tables and register for new games in a snap.

Table Ninja and TableNinjaFT are essentially the same program; one works at PokerStars and one works at Full Tilt.  The main benefit of the program is that it will provide you with tools and shortcuts to make playing online poker a heck of a lot easier.  It’ll work with cash games, tournaments, and sit and gos, as we’ll talk about in this article.

It’ll also work concurrently with hand history tracking programs like Holdem Manager and PokerTracker.  Some of the highlights include tools that speed up your play such as assigning keyboard hotkeys to bet, call, fold, raise, bet percentages of the pot, or immediately go all-in.  Other tasks like clicking the time bank and registering for tournaments can be automated, which is a huge time saver for sit and go players.

For sit and go specialists, or really any tournament players, you’re going to have a ton of benefits when you use this program.  The biggest will be the automatic sit and go registration in the special “Opener” tab.  Once you load Table Nina, look for “Sit-n-Go Sensei,” which has two tabs within it, one for “Sit-n-Go Opener” and one for “Sit-n-Go Betting.”

Within the “Sit-n-Go Opener” tab, you’ll first find a link for instructions.  The major warning here is that you absolutely need to read the instructions.  If you don’t, you run the risk of blowing your entire bankroll by accidentally registering for an unlimited number of simultaneous tournaments.

The basic idea is to create a set of rules so the program can automatically handle the registration process.  First, you’ll create the search parameters.  You’ll make sure that it only looks at sit and gos that you want it to look for within the poker site’s lobby and don't forget to set a maximum buy-in.  There’s a handy video on the Table Ninja website if you don’t understand how to get through this part, so don’t worry if you can’t figure it out right away.

There’s also a “test” button so that you can see the tournaments that Table Ninja will be looking at when you actually run the process.  Once you’ve set yourself up for the target number of tournaments, buy-in, maximum tournaments per cycle, seconds between cycles, and other parameters, you can do a final test and, if it all looks great, hit the “Start” button.

The other tab within the “Sit-n-Go Sensei” area is for “Sit-n-Go Betting.”  Once again, there is a reference link at the top of this section if you need further clarification.  This tab lets you create hotkeys for pre-flop bet sizes that change with the blind level of the tournament you are in.  It allows you to use different pre-flop bet sizes throughout the tournament as blinds go up.  There are three different blind cutoff tiers for you to work with, so you can adjust your bet sizes as the blinds increase.

Another extremely helpful section within Table Ninja for sit and go players is the “On-Screen Display (Beta)” section.  For tournament players, this is extremely helpful, while most cash game players probably won’t bother with it since most people play a deep game or at a standard big blind buy-in.

You can display everyone’s stack size in big blinds as an overlay similar to a Heads-Up Display.  You can choose to display it for cash games or for tournaments (only No Limit supported) and you can alter the X&Y axis position, font color, and text size. Being able to see stack sizes in big blinds really helps out with making push/fold/call decisions.

Table Ninja has a free trial available if you haven’t already tried it out.  If you are ready to buy, it’s available for $59.99.  Or, get it free through PokerSoftware.com.