Following in Glenn Beck's Footsteps

This post is an apology to our regular readers.  We were going to do a series on the "debate" with narrow minded full stackers but are scrapping it after much consideration.  After all, winning an argument requires a certain amount of cooperation on the part of the arguee - where the person in question decides to submit and see things from your point of view.  Doing so in this case is also counter productive, because it is tantamount to tapping on the glass.  As long as we are dismissed, our play becomes highly profitable.  The minute we are taken seriously, we will seriously need to consider doing something else, like working at McDonald's ;)

As anyone who has been following the last few posts can see, narrow minded fools will not be persuaded under any circumstances.  They simply change the argument when they see a point which they can not possibly win and spout more and more ridiculous things as a consequence.  Had we not let our utterly massive egos get in the way, we would have ignored such blather long ago, and that is precisely what we will do from this point on.

For those of you who have been following this blog over the course of its evolution, you fully understand that this blog was not meant to promote short stacking or any other style of poker.  It was meant to challenge conventional wisdom and groupthink to reach conclusions that help a person succeed in their own fashion.  I should know.  I have read pretty much every single significant text on hold'em since the day I declared that I wanted to be a professional over 6 years ago now.  While I am very grateful for the knowledge that has been handed down to me, I also never had the chance to develop a style all my own.  This knowledge has given me the tools of the professional and given me a good living, though it has also almost certainly prevented me from ever becoming a top player with a unique approach to the game.  I am hoping to break that mold for the rest of you and not further waste your time by engaging in arguments with idiots.  I'll leave that to Glenn from now on.

An Amazing Hand by Any Measure...

Willing to Trade: Short Stack Snake Oil for Baby Stack College Fund

I wanted to offer my services as a coach, perhaps for the last time. As I have vastly improved my game and winnings, I have become less and less inclined to take on new students, and quite likely will stop doing it altogether as of the end of this month. For anyone who is interested, the rate is $150 per hour, or $125 per hour for those who sign up at my rakeback site, with a minimum of 2 hours purchased.

I have included my results since September 1st and this is the last time I will be posting them as well. I don't care to gloss over the content of this site with brags or pissing contests about win rates. I am only including this now for street cred and to show that you can make a lot of money when short stacking correctly and without even putting in extreme volume.

*The oddly staked games came from a conversion error from Cake poker hands where the small blind wasn't posted. All nasty responses posted will be deleted, so don't even waste your time. Just contact me at lyelle@insightbb.com.

Debate #1: Learn to Play Full-Stacked

As we all know, short stackers are a bunch of talentless, uncreative twits who are either lazy or greedy and have no respect for the game. Luckily this is poker and not alternative music and we don't need to pretend that are we here for anything other than the money. So why should any of us "learn" to play full stacked (we have said many times that we do, but since you won't believe us anyway, just assume that we don't)? Here are the objections to this lousy argument:

IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU WANT?

I assume that since you both play online and take the time out of your day to google poker terms, that this game is important to you and therefore the money that you make (or attempt to make) is also important to you. So if we learn how to play poker, how exactly does this benefit you? You must be assuming that since we are talentless to begin with, you will still be able to crush us in your .10/.25 game where you would proudly reign as king if it were not for those lowly dissident short stackers. Yet what if that isn't the case? You have now turned an untalented fish into a competing force that now swallows fish whole rather than taking a nibble from them and saving the good parts for YOU.

But now here's the thing. If I'm talentless and yet still found a way to win, why would I give that up, especially when giving it up would mean that I would have to work a 9 to 5 job on someone else's terms? At least the people who say "DIE SHORTSTACK SKUM" have their priorities in order....

YOU WOULD MAKE A LOT MORE MONEY PLAYING WITH A FULL STACK

Supposing this is true (I'm talentless), I just don't see how this is any concern of yours. Alas, it's not a concern of mine either. No one has said anything like "you could play so many more tables" or "you will have so much less stress" or "you won't lose any sleep because you got bluffed out of a huge pot" or even "you could play much longer sessions." I eventually came to the conclusion (see article titled: ...And Everything is Illuminated) that these things are what REALLY matter to me. My win rate was probably a little bit better, but the swings made it difficult to play for long sessions at a time and I often would put in 20-25 hour weeks, which could make subpar months difficult to live on.

SHORT STACKING WOULDN'T BE ANY FUN

It's a job dillhole, it's not supposed to be fun. A job that I make a lot of money doing and yet once again, I don't see how this is any of your concern. In fact, this is what should console you and your choice to sweat it out every day and warm your soul when you can't sleep at night. I traded my win rate and variance for the fun that you get out of the game. Is this what bothers you or is it that you worry that I actually DO enjoy it? I DO...sorry, you lose again!!!

YOU ARE TAKING THE FUN OUT OF IT FOR REGULARS!

This is just stupid. Making the game fun is something that you do in a live setting or home game to keep the fish around. I don't recall anyone saying that this is some kind of rule for online play, and chances are that if you are making it fun for someone else, you have been doing something wrong. In other words, if guys are following you around from table to table it isn't because of your quick wit or because they admire your play.

And besides...all those regs hate each other, and they hate you as well. Case closed.

SHORT STACKING IS A SIMPLE, ROBOTIC, AND LAME STRATEGY

First of all, let me clarify that short stacking falls into two categories that I now like to coin: passive short stacking and exploitive short stacking. Passive short stacking is the one that most of you are familiar with and I fail to see how this is a problem in your normal game. Those are the guys who sit around and wait for premium hands and try to get all in with them before the flop. I don't understand how or why you think guys like this are ruining the game, because all you need to do is fold to their raises and steal their blinds. They are out there looking for large edges and since those come along very seldom, these guys won't be playing a whole lot of pots with you. In short, quit acting like a fucking cry baby, because that is what you are if you are complaining about this. And don't worry- these guys aren't making much money.

If passive short stacking is the poker equivalent of pan handling then all you would need to do is cross the street to avoid them. An exploitive short stacker is a back alley mugger who will chase you across the street and stab you just to take the quarter that they just saw you stick in your pocket. They are masters of finding small edges and aren't afraid to stick in all their money to get it. This what the truly successful ones are doing, and some of them are making upwards of $400,000 a year, in other words, what you would make in approximately 80 years in your normal .10/.25 game or 26 years working your job at McDonald's.

Now if there were a Nobel Prize for poker, the person who created exploitive short stacking surely would have won it. You might think it is simple, yet it is actually a superior strategy when placed side by side with ALL of them. "But it's so simple...." you whine. Exactly. It's what made Windows superior to DOS, which made computing accessible to the masses. Full stacked poker is actually a very weak strategy (let's lump them all together, for argument's sake), because for most people it does more harm than good. If it is only available or usable by a small group of elite players, then that says more about the person wielding it than it does about the strategy.

Pretend for a minute that someone were attacking you with a knife. What would you rather defend yourself with, your own knife or a can of pepper spray? With the knife, you have to get in close where you are in the most danger, strike better than your opponent and hit vital organs and then jump back before they can strike back. With the can of pepper spray, you can stand back at a distance, shoot it in their general direction and then run away while they curse you.

It has been said that if you don't know what you are doing then taking a knife to a fight poses more danger to yourself than it does to your adversary. After all, I'm not out to kill anyone, I just want to live to fight another day...

Short Stacker Poker Extortion

Lorin said something today that got me thinking. He talked about a guy calling his shove with 78s and then saying something like "serves you right you short stack peice of shit" or something along those lines when his hand hit and he stacked Lorin. One of the benefits of short stacking is the fact that other players hate us. This is evident on almost every forum post about shortstackers regardless of the forum. This is a benefit because players will call bets and shoves lighter than they should in the hopes of busting us. What they don't realize is that we don't leave the table when we get busted, we just reload. We only leave when we double up (or reach a predetermined stack size that we deem unwieldy).
I say that we take this a step further. From now on, whenever I sit down at a new table (lets say a $1-$2 NL Full Ring game) I will make the table an offer. It the chat box, as soon as I buy in for my Short stack and they all know what I am there to do, I will type in the Chat Box something along the lines of:

"Attention Players. Since none of you want me here and I will only leave when I double up, I will cut you all a deal. If each of you pony up $4, I will go ahead and leave and not return for at least 2 hours. If not I will stay, make your lives miserable by shoving on your weak attempts at blind steals, destroying your continuation bets and eating your blinds mercilessly. Eventually I will crack one of you for $40, then leave and be back in exactly 30 minutes to ruin your day again. Discuss amongst yourselves, but I need your answer before I have to post the Big Blind".

While possibly morally ambiguous, if nothing else this attempt at extortion should at least throw several of my table mates into full on uber-tilt, especially when they continuously see this at every table they play at. Just a thought. Let me know what you think, or if you have a better wording for my new "table greeting"

The Law of Unintended Consequences

We see this everywhere. A smoking ban in bars leads to more drunk driving deaths when people drive further to get to bar that has heated outdoor smoking areas. Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" program hurts the Demolition Derby sport by causing a drought of old vehicles that now going straight to the junkyard. Why should we care? Because all players who are upset by the short stack epidemic are witnessing this happening right now. The culprit? A powerful new generation of poker software that we all love and enjoy.

Many people have suggested that we raise the minimum buy in. I would like to point out, though, that the minimum buy in has always been 20BB pretty much across the board. Yet if you peel the layers back a little further, you will see that there only exists a short stack swarm at sites where the newer highly advanced HUD's are not only rampant, but encouraged. After all, the 20BB minimum buy in exists at the Cake Poker network as well, yet there are very few short stackers who exist there and none of them are particularly dangerous...because of the site wide ban on this software.

The highly detailed HUD's available through HEM and PT3 et al. paved the way for short stackers who can now slice through you with razor thin margins because of a huge list of very specific stats that can track your patterns of play from every single position at the table and can feed this information into advanced simulators on their free time like StoxEV that can measure their expected value down to the PENNY. Even if a player has never logged any hands against you, they can still purchase hand histories by the million and have a complete profile against you as soon as they wake up at noon.

So is this new generation of software aids the true danger to the game? I would wager a "yes" here. Even Kyle "Cottonseed" Hendon made a remark in one of his videos on Stox Poker that the HEM HUD is so good that it is almost like cheating. While the lines have blurred tremendously since their inception, it is certainly quickly reaching that point. Had you explained to an old time pro back in 1999 what people were doing now to the game they almost certainly would have called it such.

Intermission

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!