How does having multiple micro stacks ahead left to act effect your decision, if at all?

fundiver199 said:

First of all I would strongly advice to avoid these games, since they are not good practice for "real" tournaments, and the money at stake is completely insignificant. If you just want to have some fun and pass away extra time, you are almost better off going to the play money tables. With that out of the way lets go to the question of, how short stacks behind affect your range for entering pots.

There are actually two opposing effects. The first is, that short stacks dont threaten your stack in a significant way (assuming you are not super short yourself), and for that reason they tend to matter less. You can sometimes treat them almost like an empty seat or a sit-out players, if they are not in the blinds.

The other effect is the one, you mention yourself, which is less fold equity, if short stacks are priced in to call with any two or something very close to that. This is especially the case, when short stacks are in the blinds. If you can expect either player in the blinds to basically never fold, then that tighten up your range, because you are forced to always show down the best hand in order to win the pot.

The same happen, if people call wider, than they are supposed to, which is almost certainly nearly always the case in these silly games, since people just come to have fun and will often use a "go strong or go home strategy". This is basically like any other situation in poker, that you should not attempt to bluff someone, who dont have a fold button.

Click to expand...

Lodestone said:

I find this often happens in 888 freebuys, after late reg is over, you'll often have half or more of the table under 2bbs and I wonder how it should affect shoving/ opening ranges. It feels like navigating a minefield and your fold equity goes down because whereas with regular stack sizes, raising causes anyone who wanted to see a cheap flop to get out of the way, when you have a table full of shorties they can hop in for less than a limp usually would be.

Stealing the blinds feels a lot less attractive when some shorty with 1.1bb can come in with j2o and scoop most of the pot after you raised with 89s.

Click to expand...

eetenor said:

It seems you are alluding to a poker strategy that you have not fully grasped yet- your last sentence says it all--why would we try to steal blinds when stealing blinds is not going to happen. Therefore, we now know that the hands we open have to have strong equity when called- Ax Kx Qx hands are far better to open than 89 when there is 0 fold equity. If you are going to try steal steal with Q5.

the reduction of fold equity requires us to play fewer hands so not trying to steal is also a very good strategy.

Click to expand...

Lodestone said:

Did you really need to write that in the most condescending way possible?

Click to expand...