The decline in SNG winrates
Barry Carter takes a morbid look at how much less profitable SNGs have become following a decline in their traffic globally.
Last week I lamented the death of the SNG following the news that 888poker retired them from their lobby. I was morbidly curious about how SNG winrates have changed in recent memory and it was grim viewing.
You can see what the biggest winners are making in SNGs via the SharkScope leaderboards. I have cherry-picked some examples here and compared 2018 SNG leaderboards to 2022 SNG leaderboards. I didn't want to go further back than that because there was much more traffic and much softer games in the early days, I wanted to compare games in the 'grinder era' of SNGs.
First of all, the bread-and-butter SNG, the 9-Max Turbo. Here is the $16-$35 buy-in leaderboard from 2018 where the biggest winner won $6,357 in profit before rakeback:
This is the same leaderboard in 2022, the biggest winner won $5,793. So not much of a difference:
Let's increase the stakes and change the format. This is shorthanded SNGs with a buy-in between $36-$100 in 2018. The biggest winner took home over $20k before rakeback was factored in:
The same stake and format are staggering in their differences in 2022. The biggest winner is up just over 1/10th of that:
The MTTSNG is the other great grinder game in the SNG format. This is what the biggest winner at the $5-$15 level got in the 45-man SNG games in 2018:
This is what the biggest winner got in the same games in 2022, almost six times less. Notice also that PokerStars was the dominant supplier of those games in 2018, the 45-man SNGs are still available at Stars in 2022, but are much less popular and smaller in stakes:
Again, the biggest winners command just a fraction of that in 2022:
It's not quite as grim as it looks, some of the biggest winning SNG grinders these days play a mix of games. They'll play shorthanded, full ring, MTTSNGs, PKO SNGs etc all at the same time. They also make a lot of their income from rakeback, which is not included in the SharkScope leaderboards and it is substantial for those who can get the traffic in. However, a general trend towards decreases in rakeback benefits and a lack of promotions for SNG players (Remember Battle of the Planets?) have contributed to this downturn.
Of the old-school SNG formats, the 9-Max and the Super Turbo games are the ones that appear to look most like their former selves. The niche ones like Six Max or MTTSNGs are the ones that appear to be dying. This seems to make sense, as the more esoteric SNG formats struggle to get traffic, the grinders all congregate in the more standard formats that everyone can play.
The SNG is not dead yet and they are still a great game to learn poker and grind alongside other games. But the days of being able to make a nice income playing a lot of SNG volume appear to be gone for most players.
Do you still play SNGs? Let us know in the comments:
