Table roaches

	Buy in for small amounts, so if you go on a cold run you don’t end up going busto

As you read this, someone somewhere will be sat in front of a computer cursing a minimum buyin short-stacker who has just doubled up through him only to scurry away without so much as a ‘ty’.

These nasty little cockroaches arrive at a table with the smallest amount possible, $20 at the $0.50/$1 level, and wait for a big Ace or decent pair to shove with in the aim of either taking down a small pot or doubling up. It’s panic poker played by people that haven’t got the confidence to face a flop. Or so I thought…

After some time grinding away at the cash tables I realised that there were in fact two types of these low lifes. There were those playing above their level – the annoying ones that take a shot and run away from the table as fast as their little shaking legs can carry them if they get lucky – and another type, which, like an insect that has evolved into a bigger, stronger species, was playing on if they doubled up.

This second species wasn’t afraid to stick around and fight it out in an attempt to grow their stack to three, four or five times the original buy-in. In time I developed some respect for these super-roaches, although if they were good enough to take a small stack up beyond the maximum buy-in, why weren’t they buying in for the full whack in the first place? Most importantly, I wanted to learn their secret.

According to David Sklansky and Ed Miller’s No Limit Hold’em: Theory and Practice, playing with a short stack in cash games provides you with ‘two major intrinsic advantages over your deep-stacked opponents’.

To a player blooded on tournaments that just seems insane. Your stack could be dwarfed by other stacks up to 10 or 20 times bigger! Disaster? Well, no actually. Because it’s a cash game each chip is only worth its face value, so if you lose a tenner that’s all you lose – not a slice of a $20,000 prize pool.

The two advantages put forward by the poker theorists are as follows. First, deep stacks often play loosely against each other, raising and calling light in an attempt to hit a disguised two-pair or straight with something like Q-9. It’s classic implied odds in action. The big stacks are investing a little pre-flop, when they’re almost certainly behind, to catch up and rake in a huge pot.

This dynamic obviously changes when a short stack gets involved, and that’s something the super-roach takes advantages of. When they push a shoving hand they’ll often find that the original raiser and subsequent limper haven’t got enough to stand up to a full 20 big blinds shove. The second advantage is that if they do get it all-in with two or more callers the hand is very unlikely to be checked down like a tournament.

So while the super-roach will often end up against just one hand on the river they’ll be getting their money in at 2/1 or better – tempting odds by anyone’s standards. It suddenly started to make sense why entering as a short stack could be profitable. I had to give it a go…

No mistakes

I often have a problem of losing a lot of chips in the first 10 minutes of any cash table I’m sat at, running semibluffs that don’t hit before I’ve had a chance to establish any kind of believable table image. Sitting down with a short stack simply didn’t give me a chance to make that mistake, but it also made me pay attention to how others at the table were playing, so when I did run my stack up I was more than ready to get involved.

I played four sessions for a total buy-in of $200 (1 x $120, 3 x $40) and managed to spin it up to $1,100. Okay, it’s a very limited sample of results but they’re pretty spectacular. Naturally there are some drawbacks – the most obvious being you’re going to be coin-flipping for your entire stack a lot of the time. As a result, you should buy in for only small amounts (2%-3%) of your bankroll, so if you go on a cold run you don’t end up going busto.

Whether you decide to give this a go yourself or not, from now on you’ll always keep an eye on the short stacks and what they’re doing. For while one type of player is one you’ll want to consistently crush, the other is much harder to kill.