Short Stack Strategy

[StellarWind]

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get the book "getting started in hold'em" and i think the sklansky/miller nl book has a pretty decent short stack section

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It's a start but it seemed incomplete when I read it. You can't play 20BB stacks as a completely preflop strategy and I had trouble understanding what to do on the flop with a hand like AK unimproved. It didn't seem to live up to it's apparent billing as a turnkey strategy any newbie could beat most games with.

Now that I'm starting to understand NL better I should revisit GSiH and see if it makes more sense the second time around.

People can hate shortstackers as much as they want but you have to learn this stuff to be a complete player. People will use it against you and you need to understand what is happening. It can also be thrust upon you when you get nearly stacked and have to play another hand or two before you manage to rebuy. Finally Miller is probably right when he suggests that sometimes buying in short is good strategy when you sit down in a strange place. You can sit and watch for a few minutes and size the game up.

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i wouldn't recommend short stacking though. it seems like an easy way to make an easy profit, but it's ridiculously swingy, ...

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It seems intuitively obvious that a sensible tight short stack strategy should have very low variance compared to regular approaches.

Think of the full range of possible starting hands. Imagine you played those hands and then imagine the shortstacker playing the same hands:

1. Premium hands: You both play them but unlike you he never plays a really big pot. That limits both his wins and losses and sharply reduces his variance.

2. Trap hands, drawing hands, and other dicey stuff: Sometimes you play them and create all sorts of wins and losses in the process. He folds them and gets the zero-variance result every time.