It’s time to look at the middle game period – the time when you can’t employ deep-stack strategies but you haven’t reached the push-or-fold endgame.

At this phase of the sit-and-go players’ stack sizes will usually be varied. Because of this, when you’re playing a hand you need to think in terms of effective stack sizes – that is to say the maximum amount of chips that can be won or lost in a given hand between certain players. For example, the blinds are 50/100, you open on the button to 300 with 2400 chips in total, and the remaining players left in the hand have 1200 and 4200 respectively.