In situation when you’re playing a 10BB stack, you certainly won’t be calling a lot of preflop raises on the button with five-three suited like you perhaps might playing deep stacks. You do want hands with showdown worth. But they don’t certainly have to be huge hands.
For example, you’re in the small blind with 10BB. Everyone folds to an assertive gambler in the cutoff who starts for 3BB. You have Ad7c. Your best step in this case is to depart. Sometimes you’ll catch the cutoff with a hand like nine-six suited and he’ll choose to fold. Sometimes he’ll have, for example, A-nine suited or K-J and call you. When you look at all the probable consequences? In one cases winning the pot straightway and in other cases getting called and winning a showdown ? Departing with the hand will mean an overall benefit.
A-seven offsuit isn’t a huge hand. But it’s sturdy enough given the stack sizes, the likely starting range of a gambler in the cutoff, and the random hand in the great blind to show a benefit.
Short stack play is based on the skill to find the appropriate borderline hands in these cases. Maybe departind with A-seven is profitable and Q-seven is vice versa unprofitable. Which hands are at the break-even point?
If everyone had folded to you in the small blind, then Q-seven offsuit is actually right around the break-even point for open-shoving 10BB. (See “The Mathematics of Poker” by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman, p. 136) And that’s if your adversary plays a perfect 10BB stack strategy. If your adversary plays less than absolutly the best play than you can profitably shove some even not so strong hands.
The blinds won’t defeat you because you can adjust your strategy to the concrete situation. You can play as smartly or as loosely as the specific situation calls for. And when the game is shorthanded or the stacks are too small, it is better for you to play quite loosely.
I must take some of the sin for spreading the myth that playing a short stack it is the same as playing super-smart. In my book, “Getting Started in Hold ‘em”, I present a strategy for playing a 20BB stack that can be classified as super-smart. I created that strategy as an infallible one for rank beginners. I wanted to design a strategy that was very simple and understandable for the beginners. I wanted a strategy anyone could follow it and that would be at least break-even in all the standards, full ring cash game.
But my super-smart strategy isn’t the best strategy for 20BB stacks in a full ring game. It can be called just an adequate strategy.
In a fourhanded game with 10BB stacks, the strategy is absolutely terrible. The blinds in such a situation will indeed eat you alive, but it’s not because the stacks are too short to win. It may happen because the strategy doesn’t approach for those game characteristics.
If you come up with the true strategy, though, you can with benefit play 20BB in a ten-handed game, and you can with benefit play 8BB in a four-handed game. The blinds can’t destiny you to lose. It is only in rake’s capability.