Adjusting your play

	Players who fall into predictable patterns… will become prey

There’s a cartoon you might have seen: two vultures are sitting on a tree in a desert and one says to the other, ‘Patience my ass, I’m gonna kill something.’ If your attitude toward no-limit Hold’em is ‘patience my ass,’ then I’ve got just the game for you. It’s called short-handed no-limit Hold’em, and not only does it let you play a ton of hands and see a ton of flops, you’re actually playing incorrectly – disastrously incorrectly, in fact – if you don’t. So if you’re an action junkie like I am, then hop aboard the short-handed Hold’em express as we investigate a variant of poker where patience, God bless it, is the kiss of death.

First, what do I mean by playing short-handed? Generally speaking, a short-handed game is one with anywhere from two to six players. As you’ll see in this series, there’s really quite a lot of difference between a ‘full’ short-handed game and a ‘short’ short-handed game, but for now just consider that if you’re facing six or fewer pairs of beady eyeballs, you’re in a short-handed joust.

It’s possible to further parse shorthanded play into cash games and tournaments. Some cash games, especially online, are short-handed by design. Others become short-handed as players come and go. On the tournament side, short-handed play is generally limited to the end stages of a sit-and-go or the final tables of a multitable tournament. For now I’ll focus on cash game play, rather than the special circumstances of tournaments, where the antes and blinds are often so high as to take the ‘play’ out of the shorthanded game.

Make the adjustment

To play short-handed Hold’em successfully, you need to make three key strategic adjustments:

PAY MORE ATTENTION
In a full-handed ring game, you can sometimes afford to let your mind drift, especially if it’s the sort of game where the only thing you really need to do right is wait for big cards and then bet the crap out of them. Short-handed success comes not from waiting for big tickets but from deciphering your foes’ approaches to the game and making appropriate adjustments. So play shorthanded with complete focus or just don’t play at all.

DETECT PATTERNS
In a full ring game, the sheer number of players involved makes it difficult to detect meaningful patterns of play – and especially difficult-to-find situations where those patterns can be exploited. In short-handed play, though, with everyone taking such swiftly repeating turns on the big blind, small blind, button, etc., players who fall into predictable patterns – routinely failing to defend their blinds, for example, or raising on the button every single time – will quickly become, well, prey for the others.

CRANK YOUR AGGRESSIVENESS UP
This is the most important adjustment to make short-handed. As you’ll see in a moment, most of the time nobody has much of a hand in a short-handed game. For this reason, you need to create situations where you can win pots with or without a hand. It’s called taking control, and sheer brute aggressiveness is the straw that stirs this particular drink. As you know, conventional full-handed poker wisdom calls for a selective/aggressive approach to the game. Well, shorthanded is just like that – but without the selective part!

But short-handed play isn’t just about altering your strategic approach to the game. You also need to alter your mindset, because short-handed Hold’em is about as much like fullhanded Hold’em as elephants are like beer. Here are the three key mental adjustments you need to make:

GET READY FOR THE RIDE
Just considering how much more frequently you’ll be taking the blinds short-handed – not to mention the ones you’ll be attacking – you know you’re going to be involved in a lot more pots, which means your stack will rise and fall more steeply and swiftly than it would in a full ring game. Short-handed play is akin to a rollercoaster ride and, in the name of mental toughness, you have to make sure you’re strapped in. In other words, be prepared or be… somewhere else.

ACKNOWLEDGE SUPERIOR PLAY
In a full ring game, weaker players can evade and avoid stronger ones just by folding a lot and waiting for big tickets or good trapping situations. Shorthanded, there’s no place to hide. If you’re in a game where the other players are running all over you, you just need to run away. There’s no shame in this. The only shame comes from staying in a game you know you can’t beat until your money’s all gone and they make you go away.

PLAY THE PLAYERS
No-limit Hold’em has been called ‘a game of people played with cards’. Short-handed is like that, only more so. There are countless times when the question isn’t whether you have a hand, but whether your foe does, and whether he can be driven off the pot if he does not. We all know that poker is based on what beats what, but in short-handed Hold’em, it’s much more a case of who beats whom.

Starting point

So what sort of starting hands should you be looking for in short-handed play? I’m tempted to say ‘any two will do’, because often the will to bet is all that matters. While it’s not quite as simple as that, the required strength of starting cards definitely reduces as the number of players goes down.

Here’s why. On average, one starting Hold’em hand out of five will contain either an Ace or a pair. This means that in a full ring game, an average of two players will have ‘real’ hands and, if you’re not one of them, you can comfortably assume you’re beaten and fold. In a short-handed setting, though, the odds are good (and the shorter the game, the better the odds) that ‘nobody’s got nothing’. With this in mind, you can look favourably on hands like K-Q, J-10 suited, and bad Aces. In a context where nobody’s got nothing, these hands – plus pairs and good Aces, of course – become absolute monsters.

Likewise, when you start looking at flops, you’re going to be looking for weaker hits than you would in a fullhanded game. Hitting the flop shorthanded means hitting top pair/no kicker, middle pair/good kicker, or even a naked bottom pair. You’d hesitate to go to war with these holdings in a 10- way game, but short-handed they’re well worth backing with your bucks. Conversely, your drawing hands go down in value short-handed because there are fewer players to pay you off when you hit.

In terms of image and playing style, how you approach the short-handed game is up to you. As in any poker game, the image that’s most in harmony with your true nature is the one you’ll be able to sell most effectively. That said, short-handed games are super-charged games, and there’s no place in them for weak, cautious, timid play, either for image or for real. Your goal should always be to control the action with raises and reraises. Here’s a good way to measure your chances of success in a shorthanded game: if you’re generally the person putting in the last bet, you’re probably in good shape. Conversely, the more you find yourself calling, the more at risk you’re likely to be.

Finally there’s this: most people don’t know how to play short-handed Hold’em. They bring their full-handed wait-and-see mentality to short-handed play, where it really doesn’t work very well. So equip yourself with the skills to succeed in this variant of poker; adopt its core philosophy – not waitand- see but swoop-and-pummel – and you can be the boss of the small table: a very profitable role to play. Because at the end of the day, short-handed play is a different breed of cat. Patience is punished, not rewarded. Betting strength and hand strength don’t correlate. And the single most effective playing style is attentive bully.

Master that style, and you’ll find that shorthanded Hold’em can mean significant profits for you.