My Articles - My Blog - Video - Poker Work - Charity - Downloads - Links - Subscribe
Easy Money
This article received a lot of positive feedback for which I am very grateful. It is not meant to be an exhaustive study of short-stacked play in No Limit Hold'em (space constraints prevented that) but is meant to offer you a basic framework on which you can build a profitable short stacked strategy. After using the strategy myself in researching this article, I can tell you - it wins money, but it is not much fun!
I have been inspired.
My first source of that inspiration was a book, Rolf Slotboom’s Secrets of Professional Pot Limit Omaha. In the early chapters of that book, the author describes a strategy that he employs, in which he buys into a game with the minimum stack, with the intention of waiting for a very strong hand and then committing all of his chips before the flop. This strategy was very successful for him in the early stages of his career, and he still uses it to good effect today.
The second source of inspiration came from work. Besides writing and playing poker, I work in Poker Room Management and Game Security for PokerStars.com. Recently, in the course of my job, I came across an interesting complaint from a couple of our higher-stakes players. ‘Please raise the minimum buy-in for the No Limit Hold’em games’, it read. ‘There are people who are sitting down with the minimum, waiting for a strong hand, and then moving all-in before the flop. It ruins the game’.
My first impression was ‘why would this ruin the game?’ After all, surely so simple a strategy must be trivially easy to defeat. But then it hit me – the reason why these people were complaining was because they couldn’t beat the short-stacked players!
I have since developed a strategy for No Limit Hold’em based on this short-stacked approach. I expect this strategy to be criticised – after all, it’s not ‘real poker’. But it works well – to test it, I played a few hours in low-stakes No Limit games on the internet. My results were encouraging – in approximately 800 hands I made $734, or approximately 7.63 BB/100 (that’s a Poker Tracker statistic, and it’s very high – a typical winning player would have a BB/100 of 2 to 4 in low-stakes NLHE). Of course, 800 hands are not enough to draw rock-solid conclusions, but it’s unlikely that this is a coincidence.*
So what is the strategy? Well, if you have a choice of seats, you sit with the most aggressive players to your left. If not, you select the most aggressive table you can find. The idea is that you will wait for a very strong hand, and then either limp-raise all-in if you’re in early position, or reraise all-in if you’re in late position.
In early position, you limp hoping that an aggressive player will raise. If you’re lucky, other players will call, then when the action returns to you, you can spring the trap by reraising all-in. At this point, your opponents might all fold, in which case you pick up the pot immediately. You might get one or more calls, in which case you will usually have the best hand and be in a profitable situation, possibly with dead money in the pot from the blinds and any callers who subsequently folded.
For example, in a $1/$2 No Limit game, you limp under the gun with A♣A♥. The aggressive player to your left raises to $8 and gets two callers, making the pot $29. You then raise all-in for your entire $40 stack, putting both the initial raiser and the callers to a difficult decision.
In late position, you reraise all-in. For example, if an early position player makes it $8 and gets a caller, you can reraise all-in for your $40 stack, putting the original raiser in a tricky position. Note that in both situations, you must wait for a raise before committing yourself. Simply opening the pot for your entire stack is unlikely to be profitable unless you are at a particularly loose table.
If nobody obliges you by raising, you continue your trapping strategy to the flop and turn, where your goal is to check-raise or reraise all-in, assuming you haven’t completely missed.
Your hand selection for this strategy has to be very tight. The basic hands to make this move with are aces, kings, queens, A-K, and A-Q suited. If your table is very loose and aggressive, you can add jacks, A-Q offsuit, and possibly even tens and A-Js. All other hands have to be folded.
Once you have doubled up on a particular table, you can either leave and move to another, or you can top up to a full buy-in and play ‘proper poker’.
There are some significant benefits to this strategy. First of all, you’re almost always getting your money in with the best hand. Because your range of hands is so narrow, it’s a massive mistake for your opponents to call you with something marginal**. But in my practice session, I found myself getting called by hands as weak as pocket sevens and A-9 suited! Using an odds calculator like PokerStove, you can see that this is a huge mistake against this strategy’s basic range of hands, and that to break even, your opponents’ calling range should be similar to your raising range.
Another benefit is that you will often create dead money. By limp-raising, you are effectively ‘squeezing’ the original raiser in between yourself and a caller. If they decide to fold, they will have committed money to the pot with no chance of winning anything in return. This is excellent for you.
You also limit your post-flop decision making. If you’re not very good at play on the later streets, or you find yourself paying off too much with the worst hand on a later betting round, this strategy will practically eliminate that weakness from your game. Consequently, this method of play allows you to take shots at higher limits than you may usually play, without risking too much of your bankroll.
Another benefit is that if you end up all-in in a multiway pot, you will often be protected by other players who are fighting for it. For example, you are all-in against two opponents, holding A♣K♠ on a flop of K♣J♥2♠. Your opponents hold K♦Q♦ and J♦10♥ respectively. Your equity in this position is about 68%. However, you’ll often find that the player holding K♦Q♦ bets, knocking out the player holding J♦10♥. This increases your equity significantly, to about 86%! They have done you a huge favour without even realising it.
With a short-stack, you’ll often be pegged as a weak or unimaginative player. Consequently, your opponents may become overly loose or aggressive when in a pot with you, or take chances that they wouldn’t take against others. This is exactly the kind of attitude you would like to foster when using this short-stacked approach.
Lastly, there are other side-benefits to using this strategy online. It’s easy to multi-table when you’re playing such a simple strategy. Consequently, you can earn a lot of loyalty points in a short period of time, feed your rakeback deal, or earn a pending bonus more quickly. Of course, you can also significantly increase your hourly rate by playing as many tables as you can handle.
It’s not all plain sailing however. In my practice session, I played one hand where I flopped quads, and could not extract as much value as I would have liked. This is one of the key downsides to playing a short stack, and one of the reasons why most good players buy-in for as much as they can. Hands like quads do not come along all that often, and it’s nice to make the maximum when you do get them.
You’ll also be outdrawn more often. With deep stacks, you’ll have the opportunity to eliminate opposition on three betting rounds in an attempt to prevent a nasty outdraw. With a short stack, you have just one betting round to do the same thing, and you may find yourself in a ‘coin flip’ situation occasionally.
Most internet poker sites will not allow you to ‘go south’ (leave the table, then return shortly afterwards with fewer chips) too frequently, so you’ll have to play at a site that either has a lot of tables running, or use this strategy on a couple of sites at the same time.
Lastly, and importantly, by limping in preflop with the intention of raising, you will put yourself in some tough situations when nobody raises as expected. For example, if you limp in middle position with A-K, only the blinds call, and the flop comes K-7-4, you may find yourself losing your stack to a player who has K-4 or 7-4, who would not have played had you raised. However, this is the risk you take when playing this way – and at least you can’t lose much!
There isn’t enough space here to discuss all the possible implications of a short-stacked strategy, or all the possible situations that you might find yourself in. Nonetheless, even relatively new Hold’em players should be able to fill in the gaps themselves. More advanced players may scoff at such a simplistic approach to such a complex game, but there is no doubt that this strategy wins money, and after all, isn’t that what poker is all about?
* To clarify, this is nowhere near enough hands to draw conclusions about how much the strategy wins (to do that reliably, you'd need tens of thousands of hands), it is only enough to suggest that it is unlikely that the strategy loses in the long term.
** Barring situations in which they have excellent pot odds to call.
