Been thinking about short-handed poker lately. The guru likes to play 6-handed limit cash games, and he’s very good at it. He says that one of the secrets is to loosen up your starting hand requirements. Whereas you may throw AJo away under the gun in a 9-person game, it may well be a raising hand UTG if there are only 6-people seated at the table. Which brings up an interesting question: if you’re in middle position at a 9-handed game, and it folds around to you, can you (should you?) now treat the game as short-handed? And what about the typical ring-game situation where 1 or 2 players temporarily are “sitting out” and/or there is an empty seat also. Are these the same situations? Maybe, maybe not. Here’s my thinking:
If you’re seated at a 9-handed game in middle/late position and it folds to you, leaving only six players, something subtle has happened. All three of the preceding players were dealt cards and then threw them away. Presumably, they mucked because they had nothing playable. In other words, they would have kept and played any big pairs, big aces and/or kings. Maybe big queens, too. By tossing their hands in the muck, they are, in a sense, saying in unison: “we just threw six weak cards away.”
Big deal, you respond. What’s the point? Well, if you think about it, by throwing weak cards away, there is a higher concentration of strong cards left. In other words, the remaining six players have a higher probability of holding stronger cards than they would if the game had been six-handed to start with.
How much higher of a probability? Dunno, as I haven’t actually run the math. But think of it this way. If three people have folded, that’s six cards tossed in the muck that were collectively thought to be weaker than average. Six out of 52 is over ten percent of the deck. Is this significant? My guess would be yes, it matters. You should adjust your starting hand requirements accordingly. Just how much, however, I don’t know. Maybe it’s as subtle as playing ATs, but not ATo. Again, dunno.
Now, if you’re in a traditional short-handed game (i.e., one that only has six seats around the table) or if 1-3 people are sitting out and/or have vacated their seats in a 9-handed game, this whole idea goes out the window. In these situations, there obviously aren’t three players “sorting out the chaff” ahead of you. Poker sure is a subtle game…
Oh, on a totally un-related note, something strange happened today when I played my lunchtime game. I was in the mood for a low-stress experience, so I decided a $2 SnG was in order. I fired up a game on Full Tilt and, as is usually my wont when it’s a low stakes game, started multi-tasking before the game even got started. I opened the web and surfed a little, fired up some music, and then I opened a word document and took some notes. After about a dozen hands of mucking garbage, I woke up to ATo in late position. I went to raise, but I didn’t have the numerical slider bar in the lower right corner where I could enter my bet size. Huh? I’ve had problems with my video card sometimes losing parts of the screen, but this was weird. After a couple more hands I realized I was in a…. (drum roll)….LIMIT game. Boy, do I need to focus better. What if it had been a $20 NL game instead of $2 I had mistakenly selected? Scary…. (and pretty funny, too).
All-in for now….
-Bug
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