Playing an Extremely Short Stack, Part III

I began this series of columns by stating that one of the most important skills a tournament player can develop is the ability to make the correct play with an extremely short stack. When I state something this strongly, I am usually quite confident that it is correct. In this case, I am still confident that I am right.

One of the most important skills a tournament player can develop is the ability to make the correct play with an extremely short stack. But I was lax in not providing some explanation of why this is the case. Why is playing a short stack an important skill for a tournament player, and not a particularly important skill for a cash game player? Let’s look at two similar situations – one from a cash game and one from a tournament.

Cash game: No antes, blinds $10-$20. The game looks good and you decide to risk $10,000. However, you began with $3,000 (which leaves you $7,000 in reserve for more buy-ins, if necessary.) You have just lost a big pot and have only $300 left on the table. $300 is still 15 big blinds or (since there are no antes) an M or CSI of 10. You may decide to augment your stack immediately, but you could also decide to play your remaining $300 and then decide what to do. Even if you intend to add more chips and keep playing, it makes sense to wait until you are the button before adding to your stack. While you are playing with a stack of $300, how important are your decisions? Not very! Doubling up brings you a gain of only $300. This is 10 percent of your starting stack and only 3 percent of the amount you were willing to risk, not a really meaningful amount. Making a bad decision, even one that causes you to lose the whole $300, isn’t very costly. Neither doubling up nor losing the $300 rates to be very important in a game where players wins and losses will often be in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. Playing this short stack well is not an important skill. The shorter the stack, the less important it is to your overall result.

Tournament: Instead of playing the cash game, let’s suppose you used the $10,000 bankroll to buy into the main even at the WSOP. You survive a long time. Finally there are only 700 players left. There are antes and blinds that have been continually increasing. Your stack is getting short – your M or CSI is down to 10, just as it was in the cash game. In the cash game, doubling up was mildly good, and going broke was mildly bad. Both created a swing of 3 percent of the $10,000 you were willing to risk. In the main event, however, a double-up would be terrific. Getting knocked out after all this time would be a disaster. If you survive to the final 666 players, you will receive a minimum of almost $20,000. If you are knocked out before the money, you will get zero. The swing is approximately 100 percent of you bankroll. You started with $10,000 and now you have zero or $20,000. Note the difference: Cash game 3 percent swing versus tournament 100 percent swing! We could make the swing even more crucial by assuming it occurred at the final, nine-handed table. If you were in 8th place, worth $970,000, getting knocked first would cost you $220,000. Managing to survive to 6th place, worth $1.64 million, adds $670,000 to your winnings. Here your short stack decisions represent 20 to 64 times the money you risked by entering the tournament.

You will often hear someone say that some well-known tournament pro is really weak in cash games. There are also many steady, winning cash players who never seem to do well in tournaments. One explanation is that they have different skill sets. I can almost guarantee that any successful tournament player is very good at playing with and against short stacks. It is impossible to succeed in tournaments without this skill. Yet for cash game players, short stack play isn’t really very important. In the next column in this series, I’ll get back to analyzing some specific situations. It was important to clarify first why this skill is so important. ♠

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s at Houston and Doc Holliday’s at 9th Street — in New York City.