Hi Robb,

I recently built myself a roll from 50 up to being comfortably rolled for 25NL through SnGs at the suggestion of Bikes. I used aggressive BRM so my numbers are probably a bit thin, especially for someone who is just starting out. Still, I think that you and your dad will find that the level of play at these low level tournaments is just atrocious. I primarily played the 27 and 45 man SnGs on FTP so the 90s also probably add some extra variance. In general though I used a 30ish buy-in rule for moving up and maintained an ROI of around 14% despite having cashless streaks of 15-20 tournaments regularly.

It took me a total of ~700 SnGs to turn 50 into 500 but I was playing 12-16 at a time. Overall, I found the games didn't really differ between 1.20s and 11s except for maybe one or two more players who would folding everything except for the top 5% of their range. Honestly, between the 27s and 45s that's all you really needed to play to final table a very high % of the tournaments.

Still as I played more games you can get the feel of those people who are raising a lot in late position and start to exploit that. I found that I still learned quite a bit about how to read ranges and estimate accurate widening of said ranges based on the increasing blinds.

I also found this chart HoldemResources.net: HeadsUp Nash Equilibrium very helpful for stages past the 25/50 blind level and though I didn't follow the chart exactly because it is made for HU it was still very helpful as my stack got smaller and smaller and people get tighter and tighter trying to avoid bubbling.

All in all, the SnGs were an easier way for me to quickly build a roll and also taught me a lot about the power of fold equity as well as learning to accept variance and continue sticking your stack in when the spot calls for it.