Short Stacking

Short stacking in poker refers to deliberately playing with a small amount of chips. Why would someone do this? A short stacker has some advantages over other players. Say there are three players at a table, Player A, Player B, and Player C. Player A has 10 chips, player B has 25 chips, and player C has 20 chips. Player A goes all-in for 10 chips. Player B is next to act and has to choose whether or not to play the hand. If he chooses to play, he will be risking not only the 10 chips he needs to call, but also the additional 10 chips that Player C can raise behind him. Sometimes his hand would be good enough to call if he knew that he was only risking 10 chips against Player A, but the threat of Player C going all-in for 20 chips forces him to fold. Player A can use this knowledge to be more aggressive with his all-in plays.

In general, a short stacking strategy is designed to steal the blinds (mandatory opening bets). When you go all-in, the most common result is that everyone folds and you take the blinds without ever having to show your cards. This is an excellent result. The risk is that someone calls with a better hand. When this happens you are likely to lose your whole stack. For this reason, with a large stack, you can usually only go all-in with the very best starting hands, because the risk of getting called and losing your whole stack outweighs the possible benefit of stealing the blinds. But the smaller your stack, the more hands it makes sense to go all-in with, because the value of often stealing the blinds starts to outweigh the risk of losing your whole stack.

Such a strategy will never be as effective as nuanced play by an experienced player, but if designed correctly it can yield a positive expected value. The advantage of short stacking is that all the decisions can be made quickly (either you fold or go all-in, so you never have to see a flop) and mechanically. Players who follow this strategy are sometimes called push bots, not because they are computers (that would be against the rules), but because they might as well be. The way to make money with such a strategy is to learn it well enough that you can play many tables at once. Peter has been developing a system and is up to 24 tables, making more than $100 an hour.

For the last few days I have been working on short stacking. I am up to six tables, with a spreadsheet open in case I need to check the play in a specific situation. Most of the decisions can be arrived at by logical reasoning, but not all of them. For example, when players limp (just call the blinds) in front of you, does that widen or narrow the range of hands you can go all-in with? More limpers means more money in the pot which you can steal, and they probably don't have a great hand or else they would have raised. But it also means a higher chance that you will be called. How does the situation change as the number of limpers increases? You would be hard-pressed to answer these questions, unless you had recorded thousands of hands and analyzed the results. Which Peter has.

Like any mechanical operation, short stacking quickly becomes boring. But the ability to make $100 an hour, from anywhere in the world, at any time of day, cannot be taken lightly.

The short stacker is no one's friend. Casual players like to splash around in lots of hands, and an all-in raise usually ends the action right away. If you call with a speculative hand, hoping to see a flop, the last thing you want to see is someone move all-in behind you. Meanwhile, the pros want to take advantage of the casual players, usually by outplaying them after the flop. They also don't want the hand short-circuited before the flop by an all-in raise.

It would be risky to attempt this strategy at high-stakes tables, where the players are alert and capable of adapting their strategies to exploit what you are doing. It is best confined to low stakes, where the majority of the players are novices and casual players, with only a few professionals mixed in.

To sum up: short stacking is a strategy designed to steal money from stupid people. If you pursue it, you will be reviled by just about everyone.

This definition applies just as well to poker players in general, which raises the question of whether this is an acceptable way of life at all. Playing poker for a living is not a very admirable pursuit. There's no getting around that. You don't produce anything, you don't add anything of value to the world. Some people claim that poker players earn their living as entertainers, like actors or comedians - an argument so obviously phony that it needs no refutation.

So a poker player is not exactly Mother Theresa. Still, I think the part about being widely reviled has less to do with these considerations and more to do with an image of poker players as seedy and dishonest. There are lots of things that could raise the same moral objections as poker, only worse, yet they don't.

The state lottery, for example. If we were going to be honest, we would call the Lotto the Desperation and Stupidity Tax. I saw one commercial for the state lottery in Michigan that featured the slogan, "When you play, everybody wins." The reality is the opposite. Whenever you play, you personally lose. The lottery pays back much less than the total amount paid for tickets. It would be difficult to find worse odds anywhere. Putting your money on the stock market, horses, or coin flips would all be much better ideas. Are you at least subsidizing everyone else? Maybe, although some of that money goes back into the commercials encouraging other saps to do the same. As a policy matter, a tax targeted at the stupid and desperate seems almost as cruel as throwing them to the lions. From the point of view of those who create and peddle it, it would be hard to imagine a form of gambling more insidious and despicable than the state lottery.

None of which exonerates poker players. But we're not the only ones.