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Should You Play Shorthanded Limit Hold ‘Em?

While it happens far more in online poker than in brick and mortar casinos, poker games that were once full almost inevitably go shorthanded. So, should you [to paraphrase The Clash] stay or should you go? as you gain more experience, you’ll find that you will probably come to prefer shorthanded games [roughly 5 or less] to full ones – shorthanded play requires a kind of touch and go finesse that is more commonly associated with no limit than limit – and that’s a great reason why you should AVOID shorthanded play until you have more experience. Some others:

1) Short play is highly volatile. To play well shorthanded, you have to make a ton of calls that would be considered borderline – AT BEST – in a full game. Any time you’re making these plays, you do have a positive expectation – but it’s very slight. As a result, your swings increase – a bad situation for a newish player.

2) As with NL, there’s just not enough literature available to make up for the experience gap. With full limit, reading books can make up for a lot of played hands, because there is such a VARIETY of lit. Shorthanded usually gets only brief treatment in even the best limit books.

3) Playing shorthanded can breed some habits [like raising with K 10] that are fine plays shorthanded, but terrible play full. Until you have more experience, it will be difficult to separate your two strategies. When one bleeds into the other, you’ve got trouble.

4) A good shorthanded player can do more damage to you in a shorter amount of time than a good player at a full table. The skill gap between you is greater, relatively speaking, and you will be involved in more pots with the player, on average, than you would in a full game.

Incidentally, I know a lot of these articles focus on what not to do. But in poker, it’s easy to do the correct thing but it’s much harder to NOT do the incorrect thing [take that, Yogi Berra!]

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