What is Sit and Go?

A sit and go is a poker tournament with no scheduled start time that begins as soon as its seats are filled. A single-table nine-seat game is the classic form, but the format scales to hundreds of players. Structurally it is an ordinary tournament: one buy-in, chips with no cash value, and a prize pool paid to the top places. What the on-demand start changes is that the field size is known before the first hand, so the payout structure and the point where the bubble arrives are fixed and predictable rather than depending on how many people register. That predictability is why the format is where tournament strategy is usually learned. With a known number of seats and a known payout ladder, the value of a chip stops being linear near the money and the correct play stops being the one that wins the most chips. Variants worth distinguishing are turbo structures, which raise blinds faster, and lottery-style three-handed games with a randomly drawn prize multiplier.