I actually agree with you, whitemares. Playing deep at micros is probably optimal EV-wise if fish are deep. However, I don't really think that the difference is all that big (I've been making 8bb/100 for the last 1.5mil hands while short stacking, afterall) and for me personally, lowering the variance and increasing the volume is more important. Whenever I hit a big downswing I start feeling stressesed, start doubting myself, take pause from playing and even move down in stakes, so even if my win rate is a bit lower when I short stack, I'm probably actually making more money this way.
Btw, if anyone is interested, I studied with my DB a bit to figure out how much of an effect blockers of the folded hands have preflop.
I compared how often we get different hands in different situations. For example, this is for unopened pot when we're on the BTN/SB in 4-5max:
You can see that, for example, when the action is folded to us on the button, we actually get AK around 10% more often than 32. The difference is actually pretty noticable. For SB in 6max the difference gets even higher, to around 20%.
This means, for example, that if someone opens both 32s and AKs at a 100% frequency from the SB, he actually has AKs 20% more often.
This is something that most regs probably don't consider when making their solver sims. As an example I can give you some SB open/limp ranges that I made a while back:
Open:
Limp:
You can see that I have AA and AK in my range 115% of the time, which at first glance seems odd, but is probably more accurate than having the same amount of AKs hands in our range as T9s.
This is the number of combos we get when there's one raiser in front of us:
Here it's as expected the other way around. For example, when CO opens, we will get 32s around 10% more often than AKs.
I hope some of you found this interesting.