Kind of a hard question because table dynamics are even bigger when it's short-handed. So the best answer is most likely "it depends"

Agree the table dynamics can make the additional aggression "spew", but the question was more about whether the blinds hitting more frequently being the reason for the adjustment or is it due to card removal effect or something completely different?

I'm sure that is part of it, if I recall correctly, but also each players range of calling hands becomes wider which naturally expands the range of hands that we can open with and be +EV.

It also gives us more of a chance to exploit leaks in our opponents. I know this is all very general, but I'm sure this is stuff most of the forums have duscussed over the past years.

To the extent that card removal matters, shouldn't early folds deter aggressive opens from later positions? That is, say it folds to the Button at a 10-handed table. Well, then, apparently the first seven players threw hands ranging from "good but not great" to "complete crap" into the muck, so now the available cards for Button's, SB's, and BB's hands should be stronger than they would be if it was just a 3-handed game. The 14 cards in the muck figure, on the whole, to be weaker than random.

WITHG recommends loosening our standards by one seat when there is a loose limper in front of us. So in the Hijack (not the Button) you would raise the loose limper with the same range you would have opened in the CO.

Here's the explanation from p. 70: "The reason is there is extra value in being in a pot with a player who will call post-flop bets to chase draws to a single overcard, inside straights, or backdoor flushes."

But the short chapter does go on to caution against taking the concept too far, and it also advises against isolating with hands that have little unimproved showdown value such as T8s.

I remember some debate on this a couple of years ago somewhere. It might have been mentioned in this forum at one point. Although this theory may hold true from a very general standpoint, you have to take many factors in to consideration, for example, what type of player is in each position and what hands are they folding. There are obviously many others, but it can have a strong impact on that theory.

Intuitively it seems to me that the blinds coming around more quickly should not affect a player's standards. For instance, let's say you're sitting in the CO at a 4-handed table and you somehow know with certainty that playing your K8o will be a slight money loser for you but K9o will bring a slight profit. If that's the case, I don't see why any of that changes just because you have to sit in the BB next hand.

Edit: I think the main "compensation" for being in the blinds so often comes from this: I'm pretty sure that, in terms of game structure, it's not as -EV to be in the blinds at a three-handed table as it is at a ten-handed table. With only one player able to open the pot in front of you outside the blinds instead of eight, the range of hands you have to play against in the BB should be weaker on average at a three-handed table than at a ten-handed table.

I agree that to measure the effect, you'd need to know the open-folding range of the players who have folded. (And, for the record, I've never attempted to measure the effect; I'm just speaking conceptually here.)

But it does seem to me that unless people are for some reason folding good hands and playing bad ones, a hand on the Button dealt randomly from the 38 remaining cards after folds from the first seven players should be at least a tiny bit stronger than a random hand dealt to the Button in a 3-handed game.

(The idea isn't that Button is going to be dealt better hands in a 10-handed game than in a 3-handed game. He won't be. The idea is that when the first seven players fold, this gives us information that allows us to adjust the ranges of the cards dealt to the three remaining players.)

Also, when you're looking at A7o on the Button at a 3-handed table, you know you're going to get to attempt a steal with it. At a 10-handed table, frequently someone would raise in front of you and you'd end up folding.

I'm thinking that at a very short-handed table, the blinds come around very fast but they aren't as expensive as at a full table, and meanwhile the Button should be more valuable than at a full table, too.

This may sound strange, that every other seat benefits from the absence of UTG thru CO. But it makes sense if you think about it. If we imagine for the sake of argument a table full of 10 expert players in a game with no rake, then the players in the UTG thru CO seats should profit at least slightly from the hands that they play. If they didn't, why would they play those hands? They're experts, after all! And they had the option of folding at no cost to them. So if UTG thru CO are showing some profit from the hands that they play -- and they should since they played those hands voluntarily -- then where is this money coming from? BB, SB, and the Button, collectively.

I don't know to what extent the structure of a game encourages more open-raises from CO in a four-handed game than when it's folded to the CO in a 10-handed game.

But to the extent that CO can open wider in the short-handed game in those two seemingly analogous situations (with CO next to act and no one yet in the pot), it seems to me after thinking about it conceptually that (1) card-removal effects could in fact potentially encourage CO to open K8o 4-handed but not when it's folded to him 10-handed; but (2) I'm not seeing why the frequency of the blinds coming around should have a direct effect on preflop strategy from a given position.

I'm curious how big or how insignificant card-removal effects actually tend to be. But I don't know the answer. It does appear though that, whatever the effects might be, those effects will be bigger at a loose table. For instance, at a very loose table, the action will rarely fold all the way around to the blinds. But when it does fold all the way to the blinds, the chances that, for instance, SB is going to look down at AA do go up a fair amount.

Let's say we're playing in the SB at a 10-handed table and that no one at the table ever folds Ax preflop. Let's also say that we're looking down at KK. And we're wondering, what are the chances that BB has AA?

Let's say that on this particular deal, the action folded all the way to the blinds for the first time of the entire night. In that case, since we know that no one ever folds Ax at this table preflop, and we know that we're holding KK, we know that there are no aces among the 16 cards in the muck or among the two cards in our hand. So BB's chances of having AA are (4/34)*(3/33), which works out to 12/1122 or 1 out of 93 1/2. Which is a lot higher frequency than 1 out of 204 1/6, which is what his chances of having AA against our KK would be if we were in a HU game and we didn't have the information that 8 extremely loose players folded before the action got to us.

The difference does not seem at all insignificant. However, I think it is worth noting that the scenario I just described is extreme, and it also examines a specific holding for BB. As a result, I suspect the model makes card-removal effects seem larger than they're likely to be on the strength of a player's range at most actual tables.

I would reiterate what Nick C said here. In this situation, no matter what the immediate pot odds or the action, you can be reasonably assured of your implied odds because you are usually up against two huge hands and your outs are usually completely clean.

More generally, all of us who have played in enough low or mid-stakes games have seen this general scenario occur: three players in a hand, two of which keep raising it up, and the third one making multiple calls of multiple bets. Then the flush or straight card comes out, and the third player bets or raises it.

At this point, everyone knows what the third player has, but he always gets at least one call anyway because the pot is too big, fur coats (even if the players don't know the story, they know the general concept), etc. He often gets two calls.

I mean, in practice these players know they are completely beat, but they always pay off (and indeed, because they always pay off, nobody ever bluffs in this situation).

So I just wouldn't worry that much about the odds if you have a clean OESD or decent flush draw in these situations. Just make the calls and try to hit.

I think the looseness of shorthanded games is an illusion.

In a three-handed game the button is going to make a decision between opening and folding 100% of the time, whereas in a 9- or 10-handed full game the button will face that particular decision something like (pulling number out of ass) 30% of the time.

This means that when we have the button in a three-handed game we will play A4o some three times as often as in a full game, because 70% of the time the action ahead of us requires us to muck it.

Likewise, in the big blind, we are defending against tighter opening ranges in the full game than in the short game, because there will be openers from time to time in early or middle position.

Someone -- possibly bellatrix, possibly ILikeRocks, I'm not remembering who, all these women look alike to me -- argued very definitively in a thread in the MSLHE forum some time in the past year that card removal had minimal impact on actual game play in comparing ranges in short games to late-position play in full games.

By the way, I've made this argument for years, and I believe it, but I've stopped making it on 2+2, because I've found that all of the math guys disagree with me on it.

And in saying this, I mean no disrespect to the "math guys". One of the distinct possibilities here is that because (DUH) they are better at math than I am, they may be right and I may be wrong. I especially do not discount this possibility because I am a famously bad 6-max and heads-up player and a successful full-ring player.

But they haven't convinced me of their position, and that argument's kind of a stalemate, so I see no big reason to continue it. I certainly respect their view.

What's their counter-argument?