Review of Sit and Go Pro by Johnny Rothman

Sit & Go Pro [http://www.sitngopro.com/] includes a 41-page general handbook, a one-page hand selection chart, a 15-minute MP3, and three videos (divided further into parts) that total about an hour and 22 minutes long. There are also some extras available. As the name suggests, the package focuses on no-limit hold’em sit & gos, with no coverage at all of other forms of poker. Both longhanded and shorthanded games are discussed, but the videos concentrate on the shorthanded tournaments.

The book
The book is a PDF file, which is a decent format, though HTML would be better for on-screen viewing. All things considered, the book is really short. The advice is pretty basic up until about halfway through the book, with a lot of well-known advice on observing your opponents and on starting hand selection. The rest of the book contains more basics, but some of the advice seems more interesting to me. As one might expect, there are few hand examples, although that will be more than made up for by the videos. Overall, the book contains mostly information that is freely available, but I don’t think it’s bad by any means. And hey, it’s probably not a bad thing to study just to keep the ideas fresh in your mind. The single-page hand selection chart is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a little “cheat sheet” to tell you what to do with each hand in each position. It does not take into account the stage of the tournament or anything else; the only variables considered are your position and whether there was a raise. Therefore, it’s useful only for beginners.

The videos
The videos are narrated by Johnny Rothman. You have the option to “download” the videos, which must be played with the Google Video player, but you don’t actually download the videos themselves, but rather a form of link to the videos; you still must be connected to the internet to actually watch them. I do recommend doing this anyway, because the videos are bigger in this format and it makes it MUCH easier to see what’s going on. The audio for the first two videos isn’t very good: Johnny’s voice is often heavily distorted, giving his voice a harsh “edge” that gets a little grating, and sometimes makes it slightly more difficult to understand what he’s saying.

The first video, a single part a little over 14 minutes long, is a general introduction. This video has the format of a slideshow, like a PowerPoint presentation. I don’t think that’s a very good use of the video medium; text could have done just as well. The advice given is mostly basic and can be found elsewhere. Johnny often goes into examples without any additional pictures to illustrate them. I found myself often not paying attention in this video (although my attention span is pretty short). This particular video also has a “special offer” message playing at the bottom throughout the video, which is distracting.

The second video, a four-parter that totals about 37 minutes long, is much more valuable, since it illustrates a shorthanded sit-n-go from beginning to end. This series gets interesting around the middle, since that’s where things start to happen. Unfortunately, the video and audio for part 3 get out of sync somewhere in the middle, making it difficult to follow, which is particularly unfortunate because the game is heads-up at that point. I didn’t hear much advice regarding adjusting to your particular opponents in this video; I didn’t hear anything like “this guy is a maniac” or “see how often this guy just calls?” until the game is heads-up. This video series is mostly for getting acquainted with basic principles.

The third video is a two-parter, totaling about 30 minutes, focusing on players’ mistakes and other critique. The audio distortion in the other videos is thankfully nearly absent here. There still seems to be little advice on adjusting to your opponents; the focus seems to be more on demonstrating mistakes in order to avoid making those mistakes yourself, rather than adjusting to the mistakes your opponents make. This video doesn’t go to the end of the tournament, because the main player gets knocked out while the game is six-handed. I think the biggest problem with the videos is that, because no hands are omitted, there are too many irrelevant hands. I found it hard to pay attention to Johnny, because what he’s saying often doesn’t match what’s happening on screen: he often goes into a tangent to explain something in detail, while the game just goes on, and I find it hard to pay attention to either. But that’s just me; your experience may be different.

The MP3
This is an interview of Johnny Rothman, although Johnny does most of the talking. The audio is very clear, presenting no difficulty in comprehension. Johnny answers a couple of questions from other users, but much the advice given is fairly basic, and would have probably been much better in a textual or visual format. I don’t like the choice of using audio only; the use of voice makes it difficult to find a particular part of the interview, and it makes it difficult for the listener to absorb the material at his or her own pace. My attention span isn’t really suited for it. Text is much better. Perhaps a textual transcription should have been provided in addition to the MP3.

Extras
You can subscribe to an e-zine for updates, but I have no idea about the quality or how often it’s sent. You also get into a weekly $250 guaranteed freeroll, and there may be other bonuses; as I write this, there is a promotion in which you can win a Sony PlayStation 3.

Bottom line
The videos are the real content here, with everything else being icing on the cake. Are they worth the $97.00 purchase price? This sort of thing is always difficult to judge, since it varies from person to person, and there’s that age-old argument about any poker material, “if you just win a few pots/tournaments due to this advice, it pays for itself” (something that’s only sort of true, because it’s a matter of EV and not individual pots or tournaments). I’m kind of lukewarm on this one: the advice seems to be pretty good if you can manage to just sit there and pay attention, but the presentation could use some work. I think for this amount of money, you can probably do better, but you can certainly do worse.

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