Heads Up: SAGE

When you are heads-up at the end of a Sit 'n' go tournament with just one prize on offer the SAGE poker system can be used to ensure that your play is ‘mathematically un-exploitable’. The system itself is very simple – it involves assigning ‘power rankings’ to hands and comparing them with a table showing your optimal push / fold ranges. SAGE works best with less than 10 Big Blind stacks, with more than this you have some room to play poker. Before we get into the math and discuss whether using SAGE would be a good option a quick note on copyright. This is © 2005 Lee Jones and James Kittock.

The SAGE system’s benefit is simplicity. There are 2 key factors, both of which are very easy to work out – then a simple chart for deciding on your action. The keys factors are ‘PI’ which stands for the ‘Power Index’ of your current cards and ‘R’ which is the ratio of the smallest stack to the big blind. For each ‘R’ there are then numbers given for the SB to push all in and the BB to call based on PI.

 

Working out PI is done like this: Each card is given a ‘power number’ based on its rank:
A = 15 points
K = 13 points
Q = 12 points
J = 11 points
and the others at face value.

To get the PI of your hand take the highest card’s power number, double it – then add the number of the smaller card. For example – Q8 would be (12*2)+8 = 30. For suited cards you add 2 points to the total and for pairs you add 22 points. So the highest PI is for AA (15*2) + (15+22) = 67 and the lowest PI is for 32o (3*2) +2 = 8.

So, based on the value of ‘R’ here is a list of what PI you can push and call with:

R	All in from  SB	Call from BB
7	PI 26 or more	PI 30 or more
6	PI 25 or more	PI 29 or more
5	PI 24 or more	PI 28 or more
4	PI 23 or more	PI 26 or more
3	PI 22 or more	PI 24 or more
2	PI 21 or more	PI 17 or more
1	PI 17 or more	any hand

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