Following on from our earlier tips on how to play spin and go flash games, this is our second post where we build some more on our strategic approach to these fun short stack games…
Limp with a balanced range from the small blind
This will help us in a few ways, we become less predictable… we can limp fold, limp call or limp raise all in.
If we limp with playable hands we can easily limp call with hands that play well post-flop that we don’t want to push all-in with, we can also limp and fold with some of our range too and then we have strong hands we can induce action and move in over the top.
In this example hand we have K7o, it’s not the best hand ever, but we don’t want to just fold this and it’s not the best hand to raise either, so we settle with a limp…
Our opponent then min raises, now against a larger raise like a 3x raise we could easily fold this hand and look to continue with maybe hands like K6s+ and K9o+, however against a minimum raise we need to have just 25% equity to call profitably, so we make the call and take a flop.
We flop ourselves a piece, hitting second pair of sevens with our King kicker… so how should we continue?
We opt to play in flow and look to usually check-raise all-in against any bet… however we don’t get this option as our opponent moves all in.
If the Villian has us beat here then we will still have some equity but we decide to call, thinking that with any strong hand they would want us in the pot and bet smaller, we end up calling and seeing a random KJs for nothing other than King High. A strange play indeed, but that’s why we are playing in these player pools because recreational players love these games and we love to play with them!
Playing With Draws
With super shallow stacks, we aren’t often just going to be able to call bets with the right odds, so we will need to adjust in these spots.
A simple adjustment is to still call any small bets like min bets from our opponents, but against a size where we will not be able to profitably call, we will want to move all-in.
However, this is going to mean that we will often be at risk against a stronger hand, so we will have to just give up with some of our draws to sizings which commit our opponent…
Below are two example hands we move all-in with the nut flush draw as even if we are called a King could possibly be good as well as a diamond giving us the nuts, we could be against a worse flush draw and we move all-in with fold equity… our opponent ended up calling us with K9 so they had us in bad shape, however, we still have a 37% chance of winning, so weren’t in terrible shape even against one of the worst hands for us to run into!
Looking at the other example hand where we have a 75s giving us a flush draw, our opponent has bet pot-sized, against a smaller bet we could possibly call at least one bet, but against this sizing, it seems horrible to call and daunting to move all-in with just seven high, we are even crushed by hands like higher flush draws, so the only option which makes any sense is to just fold and move on to the next hand… so that’s what we ended up doing!
Learn your super-short stack jams
Poker is where we have to make money in the small margins, we are going to want to play a perfect short stack game in these shove wars in order to be printing money, so we will need to know which hands we will want to wager all in with when playing heads up.
In our previous post, we looked at how to call with the correct ranges but we will also need to know how wide we can move all in…
As we can see we are playing a hand with 6.3BBs effective covering our opponents 380 chip stack with blinds at 30/60… so we will want to jam all in even as wide as Q3o!
Looking at the heads up nash chat we can even shove hands like J6o, T7o and super-wide with our suited combinations including hands like T2s & 94s etc.
So the question is, are you shoving wide enough? If not then you are not playing optimally, study these free Holdem resource charts and swat up on your shoving ranges.
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