Q&A #95: The Limits Of The Short Stack Advantage

December 4, 2007

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking a lot about short stacks and how you can gain an inherent advantage simply by buying in for less than your opponents. Something I said, however, struck Joe, today’s questioner, as wrong, and he submitted the following:

First off, I must say that I highly respect your writing. I love all the books I’ve read that you’ve co-authored, and I think you’re a really great guy.

However, I have a problem with something you said in your article in Card Player. I was trying to correct another player who was citing you, only to find out you did indeed say what he was implying.

I don’t subscribe to the magazine, but you were quoted as saying:

The peddlers of the biggest myth will tell you that having a shorter stack then everyone else puts you at a disadvantage. Not only are they wrong, but the opposite is true. No matter what stack size you play, you enjoy the advantage when you are playing opponents with much deeper stacks.

I’m fairly certain these statements are false without certain qualifications. I understand your arguments that against standard opponents you can have an edge. Against deep stacks that are playing against each other with implied odds in mind, you have an immediate (preflop) opportunity to punish their weaker hands. True.

However, against a better opponent, who takes into account the fact that a short stack is still to act or is already in the pot, and adjusts accordingly, you do not have an inherent advantage. Namely, they could tighten up to the point that their play is not exploitable by a short stack. More likely, they would tighten up to somewhere in the middle where they are making the most profit taking into account the deep stacks and your short stack. You would have a (tiny) advantage in the latter case, but not in the former. The important thing to keep in mind though is that it does not guarantee you an advantage. To state otherwise would go against the same argument you made against deep stacks having an advantage, citing the table stakes rule.

Because of this, to state that under all conceivable conditions, having the shortest stack at the table puts you at an advantage is wrong. Under most conditions, yes I agree that you are forcing a (small) advantage for yourself. But I think such a statement probably leads a lot of players into thinking playing a short stack is “best”, when in reality no stack size is theoretically best. “If ed says playing with a short stack always puts you at an advantage, then it must be best. I’m going to always play with short stacks.” In my opinion (obviously not yours) this will stunt their growth in the long term. We could argue all day about what stack size is the best to learn with, but that’s an entirely different issue.

You said “I’m fairly certain these statements are false without certain qualifications.” Instead, I would say that they are true in the vast majority of real-life situations. In other words, I agree with you.

I said that you gain an inherent advantage over your deep-stacked opponents by buying in small. And I said that the advantage becomes quite large (as a percentage of your stack size) when your stack is very small compared to your opponents’ stacks. In the last post on the subject, I noted that if you are playing with antes and your stack is the size of one ante, you can get 5-to-1 on your money (in a 6-handed game) while being somewhere between 2-to-1 and 3-to-1 to win the pot.

What I didn’t make clear in the article is that your advantage depends on how your opponents play. Specifically, the more aggressively they play against each other (and therefore the more often they fold before the showdown), the bigger your edge. If you’re playing against five wet fish who refuse to bet without the nuts, you have virtually no advantage at all (though you don’t have a disadvantage either). Your advantage depends upon players folding hands that would have beaten you but weren’t around at the showdown. So it helps if your opponents will bet weak pairs and draws, hands that you have a good chance to beat in a showdown.

Most real-life games are like this. People do, in fact, bet weak pairs and draws, knocking out other players along the way. They might (correctly) do this less often with you sitting there all-in for the antes, but they’ll still do it, and therefore you will have an edge.

But it’s definitely not right to say that your advantage is automatic. It depends on the other players playing “normally,” as opposed to a strategy designed for your short stack.

In practice, in my experience, this means that your edge will be bigger against bad players, particularly bad and aggressive players. You will still have an edge against good players, since they have other players to worry about, so playing perfectly against you isn’t optimal for them. And it would have to be a very strange game indeed for you to have virtually no edge.

So what you said is strictly speaking correct. My claim was false without certain qualifications, those qualifications being, basically, that your opponents aren’t all ganged up against you to play a strategy designed to destroy your edge. But I think it’s misleading to say it’s “false without qualification.” I think it’s more reasonable to say that it’s generally true in most real-life situations, but if your opponents want to play strategies designed specifically to mitigate your edge (often to their detriment), they can.