Short Stack Tracking

Experienced poker players realize how essential position is when deciding to play a hand or not. However, the best players in the game also know the details of every opponent's stack size, in particular those opponents that are still waiting to play and are short stacked. Monitoring of short stacks at the table, will have a large impact on your decision to raise, call or fold.

That may sound drastic but it is absolutely accurate where for example you have a nice-looking hand like Queen of spades and Jack of hearts in late position, that you would normally raise you are 1st to act. However, if one of the blinds is a short stack and is likely to move all in, you will probably want to reconsider this encounter based on both of your stack sizes. Even though your opponent may be short stacked, him winning a marginal underdog hand could make you a short stack.

Some participants simply go to far out of their way to try and eliminate a short stack, without consideration of their own situation if they are way behind, and lose. Too frequently, too much is hanging in the balance where you're only a minimal favorite to win the hand, without seeing the bigger picture.

The challenge in pushing short stacks to play with you is that since they do not have much of a choice, you will very often the entering into a negative EV situation. This almost always changes if you have a giant stack or a green mzoned where you can easily yield such a loss. The theory behind this is that if you enter in enough of these hands you are going to be positive EV and can greatly better your chances of cashing in big in the tournament.

It's a calculated strategy and will also fare well when you are down to the last few at the table, and the blinds are rather deep to all the players left at the table. That is a viable and recommended strategy and most standard advice that you read about in these situations will agree. Nevertheless, at a full table - you want to take special note of stack situations of everyone remaining. To easily calculate your opponents and your own M Zone consider Tournament Indicator.