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Short-Handed Play and Game Preservation
For the serious middle or higher limit player there is an additional, extremely important reason to play short handed. If your cardroom is not in one of the major poker centers, then your game may well be surviving tenuously – here today, breaking up midday tomorrow, maybe not being spread not being spread at all during some periods.
I submit that a major factor contributing to a game being spread inconsistently in a given cardroom, is players’ unwillingness to play short-handed. If you ever want to feel like a cardroom hero, keep playing when your game gets down to five-handed or less. If some of your opponents hang in there as well, chances are strong that the game will fill up again within a couple of hours. Then you will have a sense of what your staying to play accomplished. I have seen it happen perhaps 80 percent of the many times I have been involved in this scenario myself. A game that might have evaporated and not reformed until the next day, continued on instead. This does wonders for the overall survival of your poker game. It reduces the frequency of players calling or, worse yet, coming to the cardroom only to be told there’s no game. Obviously, when they too often hear that there is no game, some players are going to give up on the cardroom.
Be Prepared for Some Fluctuations
Short-handed play does tend to magnify your fluctuations. Playing hands with small edges aggressively to the river creates unavoidable swings. You should be ready for this. The swings are partially tamed, however, by the greater overall edge you can have short-handed if you are a bit game selective, and by the larger number of hands played over a given time. As you improve in your short-handed play, your swings should decrease as long as you remain selective of your opponents. In fact, in my experience players’ fears of the fluctuations are often exaggerated. Yes, they are greater, but if you play against the right opponents they can be smaller than you might guess. When your edge is very pronounced you may be surprised at how modest they are.
Short-Handed Tips
Here’s a few tips to help with your short-handed game. They should be especially helpful to those of you who normally avoid playing once several players have left the game.
1.Adapt what you’ve learned in this ring game situation.
One of the simplest ways to keep your thinking on the right track when playing short-handed is to keep in mind a basic point made by Sklansky and Malmuth in the older editions of their Holdem Poker for Advanced Players: When you are playing short-handed it is much like playing in a blind or in late position in a full game after most of the other players have folded. If you know how to play your hand on the button, after everyone has folded to you, then you are probably close to knowing how to play it when you are on the button in a four-handed game.
2.Note that your opponents’ attitude change.
Add to the above an awareness that the “psychology” of the game changes when short-handed, and you begin to have a more thorough understanding of short-handed play. As Malmuth points out in Poker Essays, players in a short-handed game are expecting you to raise with weaker hands, and so will defend their blinds more tenaciously. A hand, therefore, like with which you might routinely try stealing some players’ blinds in a full game, might need to be folded (or might be worth just a call) a little more often when playing short-handed. Focus more on hands with some high card value.
"The Best Player I' ve Ever Seen " / The Hit and Run Follies / An Illusory Winner /
On Randomness, Rushes, Hot Seats, and Bad Luck Dealers / Bad Beat? Think Again
Why Learn to Beat Tougher Games? / Practicing Game Preservation
Short-Handed Play: Don’t Miss out / How I Learned Poker: Part I
How I Learned Poker : Part II