We all know that patience is important in poker, and I’ve often wondered if there was a way to quantify this. So I decided to try a little experiment and test how long the infinitely patient person would last in an online SNG tournament. This theoretical person is so patient that he folds every single hand, even pocket kings and aces. They do get cracked sometimes you know!

So I signed up for four $1.25 9-person turbo SNG tournaments and clicked the ‘Sit out next hand’ button. Then I watched as the blinds ate up my chip stack. I understand that four games isn’t enough data to be conclusive, but the results were amazingly consistent and really surprised me.

In all four games, I ended up on the money bubble with fourth place finishes. I lasted 27 to 34 minutes in the games. I lost a total of $5.00, and my ROI was -100%. So what conclusions can we draw from this?

1. The ROI of this ‘folding every single hand’ approach was terrible at -100%. This proves that folding every hand is not the best approach to SNG tournament poker. We already knew that, but more experimentation will be necessary to determine how many hands we should be playing.

2. The variance of this approach was non-existent, with identical finishes in each game. This seems to indicate that playing very few hands corresponds with very low variance. But we’ll need to conduct more experiments to see if this is really the case