After having subscribed to Daniel Negreanu's poker training site PokerVT I have started to learn about the nitty gritty stuff of playing SNGs properly. I have made a serious attempt at using the techniques I learned there at the $2 level on Full Tilt, but have not been very succesful so far.

I combined it with trying to play a lot more tables at the same time, since grinding SNGs is fairly robotic work. 12 tables seem to be the max for me at the moment, giving me just enough time to make each decision. I think I may be giving up part of my edge this way, but ppl are playing so horribly bad at this level it shouldn't matter much. I treat everyone there as 1 type of player, the calling station. So it's a matter of getting good cards and taking them to value town.

It works to some extent, but the most important thing they teach in the SNG course if the push fold part. Basically if you are playing tight opponents, it starts to become correct (profitable) to push any 2 cards from the small blind into your opponent in a lot of situations. Only problem is, the ppl I'm playing against are NOT tight, so it's NOT correct to push most hands and thus you are kind of stuck waiting for decent hands to do it with.

Maybe it will be better at the $5 level, but I have not tried that yet. So far I've played around 200 SNGs this way and sort of broke even (-$10, but I earned full tilt points and cleared some bonus, so in the end I broke even).

It's nice to know I can 12 table though ... Will keep you all posted on the progress...

I've had this cabinet sitting at our house for about 5 years. Maybe even longer, I'm not even sure anymore ! This weekend I had a good friend come over who was happy to help me with this. We're about half way now, with everything working except the joysticks.

We gave up for the weekend because the soldering iron we were using was not strong enough to unsolder the old solder points inside the gamepad we gutted for the project. He has taken the whole controller panel and gamepad with him and promised to try and work on it with another friend, with better equipment. If all goes well he will come back later this week with at least 1 of the controllers working ! 

So far, we have :

Mounted the monitor inside

Connected a power splitter to the power switch on top of the cabinet

Stuck the PC inside and connected the power to the screen and PC

Connected the lamp behind the marquee

Configured the PC with drivers and software. MAME + Roms are installed, but no joystick controllable front-end is configured yet.

Pictures of the process are in my gallery ... Updates coming soon ! stay tuuuned :)