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Strategy to Play Short Stack in Poker Tournament

  • Published Date April 21, 2020
  • By Admin

Strategy to Play Short Stack in Poker Tournament

Short stack strategy is one of the easy online poker tactics to learn and an important for any newbie player. You will inevitably face a short stack at some point in your Poker career. It will probably happen in every Poker tournament game in India. So, learning how to cope with short stack is an important poker strategy to master. To play efficiently with few chips involves changes in your strategies, depending upon the size of your stack.  

What is a short stack while playing online Poker?

To simply put, short stack in Poker means the number of big blinds your stack represents in comparison to your opponents. If you have a short stack in a tournament, then you have less room to make plays. So, to turn the game in your favour, it is vital to have an online poker strategy.

Evaluate the situation

While playing Poker online, if you see that your stack size is smaller than your opponents, then you should start to evaluate the situation. All you need to do is answer these simple questions to yourself:

How big is your chip stack as compared to your opponents?

How big is your chip stack as compared to the size of the blinds?

How big is your chip stack as compared to the normal stack?

Now you may be thinking, how to know that you have a short stack? You can easily consider yourself a short stack when you have about 10 to 20 big blinds to play online poker games, or you have no choice to bet except to fold or go all-in. 

Shorter the Stacks, The More it Costs

When your stacks get shorter, each bet, call, or raise you make will take up an increasingly large portion of your entire tournament equity. You even can’t play drawing hands because the cost of drawing and failing are too high. As your stacks get shorter, you have to look for the possibilities to move all-in. However, you could not let things get too desperate. An all-in bet with few chips won’t threaten anyone. Whereas, all-in with 15-20 big blinds is still a threat to your opponents.

Don’t Wait for Strong Hand

As you are short-stacked, you don’t have the scope to wait for strong hands. However, you have a choice to go all-in if you are lucky to get big pocket pairs or medium hands like A-K, A-Q, K-Q, A-J, A-T, J-10.  Also, if you are among the ones to take action in a late position. Furthermore, you can also go all-in with any two cards if none of your opponents has bet before you. Obviously, the bigger your stack, the higher your chances of success.  

Implied Odds Are Not Significant

The idea of implied odds goes out of the window when you have a short stack. You don’t have adequate chips to win a big pot in a later round of betting. If all you have are 10 or 15 big blinds, you won’t be able to win any big pots because you don’t have adequate chips to play in the tournament. Playing small-suited connectors and setting up with small pairs are also strategies that you can use when you are short stacked. Of course, they come with a cost, and the chance to succeed with hands like these is low.

Stop Limping

You should avoid the temptation to limp-in and hope to see the flop inexpensively. If you have less than 10 BB or fewer, then you need to go all-in if you play a hand. When you have 15 or more BB, then you can manage to make your usual blinds. If you have between 10 and 15 blinds, then you are stuck in a situation, whether to go all-in or to go with a regular raise.

Be Selective and Aggressive with your hand

Once the flop is revealed, you will have only two decisions to make, i.e. push or fold. That’s it. No other choices. Either it’s all or nothing when you see the flop. If it seems that your opponent will bet if you check, then it’s probably better to be aggressor than the caller. In case if you bet, your opponent could possibly fold. If your opponent bets and you call all-in, then you have relegated yourself to win at the showdown.

To have a short stack does not have to mean you are crashing out from a tournament. If you know, the correct strategy to play can easily increase the size of your chip stacks and make it to the later stages of the tournament. The main key to be successful in short stack Poker strategy is to bet aggressively before or on the flop and avoid speculating. To have a good short stack Poker strategy can be very profitable than many people think.

If you know how to play a poker tournament, don’t jump directly into it. Instead of playing for real money, try your hand at short stack strategy by playing online poker games on Gamentio. Once you feel confident about your gameplay, then only head over to play for real money tourneys. 

Sign up for free and test your poker game skills by competing with the players all across the country.

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