Get better odds from playing short handed poker the smart way...
MAKE SHORT WORK OF IT I’ve always enjoyed and recommended short-handed poker games. The reasons are easy to understand. If you’re at a table of no more than four or five players you’re likely to be dealt getting on for one hundred games per hour. With a little luck that will translate into you being able to see dozens of flops during that sixty minutes of helter skelter action. Some players like the slightly more ponderous, thoughtful approach of a full ring game with ten players imagining they’ve found the card equivalent of chess. I enjoy that mind-set also but for me the fast and furious world of short-handed play has a buzz and an energy that is extremely difficult to resist. Of course if you’ve decided to take up short-handed no limit Hold’em the first thing you must do is re-think the value you give to your hole cards. At a table of ten players you’d probably think long and hard about playing Ace-Jack from an early position but perhaps be tempted to get behind it if you were last to act and the waters seemed calm. In a short-handed game of say four players you would probably consider a pre-flop raise with Ace-Jack.
CONSIDER THE ODDS The re-valuation upwards of these hole cards is entirely dictated by the odds. Obviously in a four handed game the chances of someone having a better starting hand than your Ace-Jack are only forty per cent of what they would be in a full table ten player game. Another major buzz that comes with short-handed games is the increased difficulty of drawing conclusions from the flop. If players are raising pre-flop with unremarkable cards it becomes challenging in the extreme to figure out what among the community cards may have helped their cause. The result is a lot of four player games are won with Ace high or the like.
FACTS THAT WILL HELP There are some interesting stats to help your short-handed decision making process which tends to happen in a flurry of activity. Any player holding disconnected hole cards will fail to pair any one of them two thirds of the time when the flop comes down. It is an odd situation where the potential for the flop improving a hand becomes so unlikely. Very often an aggressive stance taken pre-flop is the best way to steal the pot in a short-handed contest.
TAKE A STAB AT IT If you bet your way aggressively to try and steal the pot in a short-handed game it’s called “stabbing”. A good way to proceed with stabbing is to attempt to bet out around two thirds of the pot and see who mounts opposition. A call against you at this stage, and certainly a raise, should probably be enough for you to fold.
