If everyone else at the table has 100bb and you have 50bb they pretty much have to play in a manner that ignores your stack. They will make speculative calls with suited connectors etc assuming implied odds with the rest of the table that just aren't there for your stack.

The dynamics change quite a bit when you are short stacked and for the most part opponents don't take this into consideration much until they are faced with a big decision. When you have a short stack you can apply a lot of pressure to other players and put them in awkward spots simply because they have to worry about other deep stacks behind them. In general playing with stacks under 100bbs will create awkward spots, but it's going to be far more awkward for the opponent that isn't used to playing short stacked than it is for the short stacker himself.

How would you improve it?

Genuinely curious, as I consider it to be a near perfect balance between value, exploitation, defense, and a host of meta factors.

However, I could be wrong.

If Im reading the graph correctly, you're making just over $2/hr? Im pretty sure a good player could do better than that at 1/2 without ever looking at his cards and just exploiting bad players.

You're missing a decimal point Mike. He's making like $22/hr or something.

You know, this actually came up recently at a casino where the locals decided to talk about me. I have never really concerned myself with how others view my game, but I was amused to find out that I am considered to be a weak-tight losing player. Maybe break even.

People will inevitably see what they want to. Whether its a fuzzy graph, or a super nit that comes in every weekend and never plays a hand.

The truth?

Well, the graph is fuzzy. I am a super nit. I raise a fixed percentage of my stack. I don't bother with position. And my entire strategy could be written on a napkin ... with a crayon.

And I've made $93,895 in 4042 hours of play at 1-2.

:shrug:

I don't know if that's an accomplishment or not. I have mixed feelings on the matter.

My bad. The numbers are tiny and blurry.

Not unlike the entire sum total of my poker knowledge. However, I compensate with dashing charm, effervescent good looks, and the ability to rock a cardigan like no other biped.


Just saying.

DalTxColtsFan, note that gobbledygeek used to be a very good LHE player and made the transition over to being a winning NL player, so really trust what he says about crossing over.

Other people have more or less covered the basics of shortstacking NL, but I'm going to advocate that deepstacking NL shouldn't be that scary.

First of all, people have these stories about fish with $1,000 in front of them or whatever but IME (and maybe I just live in a bubble or whatever) 90% of the fish have less than $100 90% of the time. So you're rarely putting YOUR whole stack at risk. More than a few times I have more chips than the rest of the table combined.

Secondly, there's a big advantage that LHE players come in with, and that's being able to value bet thin. Bad players are bad in the same way whether they're playing 4/8 LHE or 1/2 NL. They play too many hands and call way too much. When they're shortstacked, they pretty much pot commit themselves when they coldcall your preflop raise; value bet the same way you would a LHE hand, watch your top pair second kicker hold up UI, and as a bonus get berated.

You win monies by Hungry Hungry Hippoing a bunch of shortstacked loose passives and not donking it off to the nits and good players. Just like LHE.

Out of curiosity, fluxboy, why don't you move up to shortstacking 2/5?

Hi nrook,

Actually, the original intent was to move up aggressively as possible and play the highest stakes I could find. Unfortunately logistics factor into the equation. The 2-5 in my city dried up shortly thereafter, and was replaced with PLO.

I swung by Vegas, but found the games to be quite crummy. As many have emphasized over the years, game selection is paramount. To be a shortstacker, you really want to have good, loose games at multiple venues. As you move up, this can become a logistical nightmare.

I think it can be overcome, of course, with the right planning.

But I am a little lazy.



All the best.
Flux

OK, so assuming 40bb effective stacks at a 9-handed loosepassive table.

I'm UTG with JJ. I raise to, say, 4bb. MP and BTN call, both blinds fold.

So 13.5bb in the pot. Flop comes 855tt.

I make a c-bet of 10bb. MP raises to 30bb and I only have 26bb behind.

Do I call?

What is tt? Is that a suit? Hand histories are much easier to read in $ amounts. $8 sounds like an awfully small raise for a loose passive 1/2 game. Is this a weekend game? Do you generally make decisions without general reads of the other players?

This is Global Poker (I'm using it to practice shortstacking while I decide whether or not to try it live). I usually just hit the pot button when I come in for a raise which is 3.5bb so I rounded up to 4bb. Global actually has a surprisingly diverse player pool so I usually have no more than a few hands on specific players. But typically at an NLHE table on Global there will be 3 or 4 limps and if there's a raise they'll usually all call. c-bets get called if the villain has a pocket pair or just about any card paired on the board. Draws will usually call on the turn.

tt=two toned - flop has 2 cards of the same suit.

This probably isn't the appropriate place to ask online poker questions, but without reads this is a trivial shove. One good thing about playing a short stack is that it trivializes your decisions. Your stack to pot ratio is going to be really low in general. When you do play strong hands like JJ+ it's going to be hard for your opponents to outflop you on a board like this, and when they do cooler you it's not a huge deal because you can only lose 40bbs. In this particular hand your opponent can be raising with a lot of worse hands which makes this decision very easy.

From everything I've been reading not just in this thread but other threads on the LLSNL forum, it feels to me like the conditions I'm seeing on Global Poker are at least similar to what I'd see at Winstar or any casino with similarly-soft NL competition.

You would give me the same advice without reads if this happened within my first few hands at Winstar at a 1/2 table where I didn't know anyone at the table, right?

EDIT: If effective stacks were 100b rather than 40bb is bet/folding the flop a viable option vs. most villains?

First of all, I think you are making a big mistake if you expect any online game to mimic a live game, particularly if the amounts of money are different. Playing online will sharpen your NL skills, but you will still need to translate that to the live game. Some examples of differences I would expect: online players should be more aggressive in spots, online players should be a little more patient and a little less sticky, and preflop raise sizes should tend to be larger live. If the online stakes are smaller then people just aren't going to care about losing their stack as much as a 1/2 player would.

In the JJ hand, if you are deeper then bet/calling becomes a more viable option.

I rarely make decisions in live poker without reads. Even if I just sat down I'm going to create profiles of the other players to help my decision making process (ie this guy probably doesn't bluff much, this guy doesn't look like he has a clue, this guy is a gambler, etc).

I can't pretend to be an expert on Winstar 1/2 as I've hardly played it. I'd expect in general the play to be more passive than the higher levels, but on the weekends I'd expect a lot of players that have absolutely no clue what they are doing and there are probably a lot of gamblers. I think a good rule of thumb is to not fold strong hands to players like that.

I would never ever open to less than $10 in a 1/2 game. With a shortstack and UTG with JJ I'd be more likely to make it $12 or limp planning to reraise all in if the table is aggro at all and I can expect a raise from someone else.

Raising to 10% of stacks seems pretty decent to me (it's what I attempt to do). Might be missing value as his stack becomes smaller, but then again, maybe no one wants to call a $15 raise from an $85 shortstack, so $9 is fine (unless perhaps it is getting too many callers).

The more I play, the more I understand the benefits of shortstacking and the difficulty of playing deep. My table selection process has actually changed quite a lot regarding this, with some of it attempting to simply double up my "shortstack" of 100bb at the deepstack table, and then move my big stack to a shortstack table where I have zero difficult decisions in still a profitable environment. Course, still mostly revolves around who is sitting with what type of stacks.

His giraffe is pretty fricken aweseome, imo.

Gcongratsandwelldone,imoG

Thanks GG, always enjoyed your taglines.



My general raising strategy is questionable. Maybe I can touch on it a bit, for anyone curious.

There are a host of valid reasons for varying your raise size for the conditions of the game, and not embracing a simple formulaic approach. However, I view the game from a different perspecitve. The game outside of the game, if you will, and my philosophy I adhere to eschews complexity in favor of simplicity.

I believe Plato once wrote that a soldier should not train as an athlete. And an athlete should not train as a soldier.

In the fantasy world I live in, poker is war. I'm not performing triple pirouettes for the judges. I'm raising 10% and looking to shove, fold or flop. Doesn't matter if I have $50 or $500. And it doesn't matter who I am facing. Everything that follows I have already scratched out previously in my lonely moments with pen and paper.

I have always adhered to the belief that it is better to play an imperfect system perfectly, than a perfect system imperfectly.

Or as Musashi Myamoto once wrote:

There are many schools that advocate spinning and twirling with the blade. I have always found it best to have your opponent spin and twirl beneath yours.



All the best,
Flux

40bb effective stacks, a tight player opens to 5bb from UTG+1, folds around to us in the CO with AQo. 3-bet intending to call a shove or fold? I assume 3-bet folding is not an option.

AQo is a hand that could probably be played many ways, but my default in this particular case (a tight open from EP with no significant other dead money in the pot) is to fold it.

GimoG

100 percent do not agree with the first sentence. Surprised you wrote it as much as you play.

If it's folded to you on the button, raising to $10 is a mistake. Raise to $8 or $9 and here's why: Once the pot gets to $20, any place with a BB/promotional drop you are losing $2 by allowing the pot to get that big. Keep the put to less than $20 to reduce the rake at this point. $9 makes the pot $19 if the SB folds and BB calls. $8 makes it $18 if SB calls and BB folds. Kinda have to realize which one of them is more likely to call.

Are these real things that happened, or just how you imagine it going?

$20 raises should be 3 handed or less a huge percentage. If youre at a place where people are calling 5 ways to a $25 raise, presumably youd just bet even more preflop, or you could just ship it pre.

As far as what you do if you raise it to $25 with AK and it goes 5 ways, yeah you should be pretty much shipping any flop there. $125 pot, and you bet $75 into it, worst case scenario youre facing 1 caller, and you need 27% equity.

Lets say they have 96 on a 982r bord, you have 22.1% equity, and your EV- for the flop ship is about $13. that will be counteracted by times when it folds around, or gets called by draws, or gets called multiple ways by one pair type hands that you have 6 outs against. Every once in a while they will flop 2 pair+ but thats rare.

So at minimum your AK is near net neutral EV, and shipping will get you more calls when you have AA or whatever.

On top of that, whenever you hit an A or K, of course youre just printing money.

QQ, again, if its actually going 4 ways, you should be betting more, but youre still getting $100 in good a huge percentage.

And yeah, end of the day you just gotta look at shortstacking like a 60/40 coinflip over and over again. Sometimes you lose, thats poker. If you start winning, seperate your winnings and use that so it wont hurt when you lose $1k+ straight, cuz itll happen.

Well if you dont like the accepting nature of the community towards your shortstacking, heres a guy who doesnt accept your perverse lifestyle.

This is so gross. $22/hr is great, certainly near the best you can do at low stakes. I am surprised to hear your preflop raise size is so small, but I wouldnt question it, the results spesk for themselves. I would absolutely hate to have you at my casino.

The reason I have an issue with your gameplay isnt that I think you can win more, its that I think you can have more fun (and also not ruin everyone else's fun). Poker is a fun exciting game with deep complicated decisions. Your poker is about as complicated as bingo, and my decision making against you would also be about as complicated as bingo (and, notably, id be forced to lose money to you in order to play the far more fun deepstacked poker game).

Im all for shortstacked as a way to learn the game and observe, but I dont see the point in doing it for this may hours. Personally i cant see how playing such a grating heartless style over thousands of hours doesnt crush your soul.

(im somewhat joking. Everyone has fun in different ways, and maybe you find the mechanical nature of your game soothing. But if youre playing for fun, and you arent having a whole lot of fun, you should seriously consider playing full, and if youre doing better than break even, screw the winrate, your hobby doesnt need to also earn you $22/hr)