I was having a discussion with a colleague of mine a few days ago about the effect of players buying in for a short stack in NLHE cash games. I felt that they were no longer the same threat that they used to be some years ago and there are four clear reasons for this. Firstly when we discuss the concept of short stackers then we are obviously referring to good short stack players and not the multitude of weak to moderate short stack players. Just because a player buys in short doesn’t necessarily mean that they are about to play a good short stack strategy!

Secondly there are clearly defined strategies for combatting short stack players that play well. For example tightening your raising range is one while also reducing your raise size. Short stack players are no different to other types of poker player in that some play more tight-aggressive than others while some play very loose-aggressive. So 3/betting over a good short stackers late position raise can often be a good strategy as well. The key to playing against a good short stack player is essentially to adopt the same strategy that they use or a better one.

Another reason why we shouldn’t necessarily fear short stack players is that their effect in games like NLHE full ring are nowhere near as pronounced. For example implied odds and average stack sizes are much lower these days in full ring games. This means that your edge in big pots is not really that great and so your profits come from playing small to medium small pots. So even a skilled short stack player doesn’t really harm you all that much as long as there are not too many of them on your table at any one time!

Finally there is one further reason as to why we shouldn’t be overly concerned about someone playing a short stack. At the end of the day the online poker community needs new players and as much liquidity as possible. So the presence of short stack players adds significant numbers to the player pools. These players help to keep games going and this can only help the online poker community rather than hinder it. When you also consider that most sites and networks have increased the minimum buy in amount, then these guys are being forced to play a little more poker than what they really feel comfortable doing!

Carl “The Dean” Sampson is an 888 poker professional and poker writer.

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