According to legend, WSOP founder Benny Binion created the first ever satellite as a way of increasing numbers for his new $10,000 World Championship event. With players willing to stump up the buy-in in short supply, he simply suggested that ten players pay $1,000 to sit around a table and play until one of them had gathered it all up into a $10,000 entry for the Main Event.
Since that time tournament poker and satellites to the largest tournaments have flourished, and this ‘shootout’ format - where a single seat is awarded to the winner - is still popular. On PKR, players can qualify to the WSOP Main Event for as little as $7.30, by winning a first round shootout into a $66.50 event, and then winning that to qualify for a $625 multi-table satellite where many seats are awarded (the latter 'super satellite' format is also now a major part of qualification for most events).
However, if you are used to traditional Sit & Go’s, the winner-takes-all format can require a significant change of mindset. No longer are there other prizes to play for and the chance of doubling your money just for surviving until third. Now you must play to win, and coming second is as bad as coming last (not to mention significantly more painful).
Another result is that ICM considerations (which calculate your equity in the prize pool based on relative stack sizes) are now irrelevant, since with one prize your chips have a linear value. For example, in a $1,000 WSOP qualifier with 1,000 chips to start, each chip will be worth $1 at every stage of the event no matter what happens.
Pushing your edge
What this means is that you can play looser and more aggressively than in a normal Sit & Go, especially if your opponents are weaker than you, since getting into big confrontations doesn’t benefit other players at all. In fact, the only things preventing you from playing in exactly the same way as you would in a cash game are the fact that you can’t rebuy and that blinds increase. For these reasons, you want to err on the side of caution in very close situations if better spots might come up later, and you need to be aware of how the changing stack sizes affect your decisions at every stage of the event, as well as how to adapt as players are eliminated.
Next in this series