Jelmer Aukema came up through the sit-and-go mills. He discovered single-table tournaments as a student in Leeuwarden in the late 2000s and was immediately, permanently hooked on their shape: nine players, one table, and a payout structure that starts distorting chip value from the very first hand. He played them in industrial volume for the better part of a decade — his results database runs into the low six figures of games — and the format taught him the lesson he has been writing about ever since: a chip is not worth what it says on its face, and the difference is where tournaments are decided.
When the sit-and-go economy shrank, Aukema moved to multi-table tournaments and found his old trade waiting for him at the end of every one. A final table is a sit-and-go with a history; a bubble is the same squeeze at a larger scale. He now plays a full mid-stakes online tournament schedule from Rotterdam, and his study routine has not changed in years: rerun the endgame, put the stacks and payouts into an ICM calculator, and find out what the pressure actually was — as opposed to what it felt like at the time.
On this site he writes the tournament material: ICM from first principles, bubble play, short stacks, final tables, satellites and their odd incentives, sit-and-gos, and the standing question of how tournament decisions differ from cash decisions in the same spot. His examples come from his own database and from reconstructed endgames, and where a spot has no solved answer he says so and reasons in direction rather than decimals.
Aukema makes no promises on behalf of the format. Tournaments pay rarely and lie often, his own results curve included, and he regards any writer who quotes an expected ROI as either new or selling something. What he offers is the endgame, rehearsed.
