Short stacked No-Limit Holdem

Years ago when the legendary Doyle Brunson first wrote his epic book, Supersystem…he concentrated on playing deep stacked poker. In fact the stacks were so deep in many of the games that he played in that it would be very rare these days to find a similar situation in online poker.

But that book was probably responsible more than any other book for vast legions of players wanting to emulate him by playing deep stacked poker. Now there is nothing fundamentally wrong with playing deep stacked. If you are a skilled deep stacked player then your optimal game will be to play against unskilled deep stacked players.

The prospect of winning a 200BB+ pot is what makes deep stacked poker so alluring for many players. The problem of course stems from players who over estimate their ability to not only play deep stacked poker but to also play good solid post flop hold‘em which is basically the same thing.

There is probably no other form of gambling other than maybe trading or financial speculating where someone can achieve a very high percentage of success but still be a net loser. This is why many players are not cut out to play deep stacked no-limit hold’em. They play well for a while but then have that one big blow up where it costs them their whole stack.

Or they have played well for several hours but have basically been losing slightly and then get all-in as a big favourite only to ultimately lose the pot. They then begin to tilt like you won’t believe and tilting in no-limit hold‘em is a licence to lose money. So the bottom line is that these players shouldn’t be playing no-limit……or should they?

Once you begin to scratch the surface of no-limit hold‘em and analyse its many subtleties, you will begin to understand that deep stacked play and being deep stacked isn’t necessarily the golden egg that many people believe it to be. It is often said that if a player is sitting down at a table with $100 when everyone else has $400 then this player is at a tremendous disadvantage.

In a cash game setting then this is utter rubbish. Another argument is that the small stack cannot win the other players entire stack when he has a big hand! This is true but that isn’t necessarily the reason why this player is sitting with a small stack. Playing good solid small stack poker is basically reducing the game to two betting rounds as a good short stack player will either get all-in before the flop or on the flop.

This totally eliminates the big stacks ability to be able to outplay him from the turn onwards. It also eliminates any technical or personality flaws that the small stack player may have as his decisions will now be almost totally automatic.

It is for this reason that a small stack can often be a compete nuisance to a big stack. As a big stack then you know that you cannot outplay them on multiple streets. You also have to be careful of attacking their blinds with weaker hands than usual because they could be just itching to shove all-in against you.

For example it has been folded to you in a NL100 game and you have $145 on the table, you are on the button with J-9. If you raise to $3.50 and the big blind is sitting their with only $20 then he may shove a wider range against you if he suspects that you are stealing, which you will be a fair percentage of the time.

By Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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