From The Felt: Short Stacks

Monday, February 9, 2009 - John Greene

Let’s talk about short stacks in cash games for a minute. Cash games, if you never noticed, are different from a tournament in one very real way: not everybody who sits down has the same number of chips. We’ve all sat down at a table and thought we were doing OK until some yahoo with more chips than sense that can bully their way around drops down and turns the table into a…I’ll call it a <EM>Richard</EM>-waving contest. There are advantages to having a short stack, though.

First, you’re minimizing your risk when you pay with a short stack. If you have fewer poker chips in front of you, you’ve got fewer poker chips to lose. The inverse of this is, of course, that you’ve got payoffs that are minimized. If you’ve got 25x the big blind, you can only win 25x the big blind when you have a fantastic hand.

Secondly, decisions are going to come much easier for you. If you know you’ve got a decent hand, but not the best possible hand, it’s a lot more simple for you to play the hand with fewer chips. You get money in the pot without having to worry too much about drawing hands, two pairs, or anything else that might come your way. The only real concern about playing when short stacked is to get money in the pot while you’re good and doing so on the flop or turn. Doing it there means you don’t have to make that difficult a decision when the river comes ’round.

Finally, and this ties into the previous benefit, it’s going to be easier to walk away from a hand. I’ve seen myself chase bad hands when I had a bulging bankroll, and lost more money than I should have on a whim, instead of playing poker the way I’ve preached for the last two decades.

Of course, if your decisions are easier, so are your opponents. You’re going to have a hard time bluffing when short-stacked and you may find yourself going for the flop or giving up. In some ways, short stack play is the best thing for players new to the game, and I could even argue that it’s the purest form of poker there is.

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Tags: From the Felt, Poker Strategy