The best short stack poker strategy is to play tight preflop, fold all speculative hands like suited connectors and suited aces, bet small postflop with both your bluffs and your value hands, play your draws fast and use the squeeze play often.
Tip #1: Just play short-stack poker with discipline:
Premium starting hands only. No hands that aren’t likely to be leading by the end of the flop. Get your chips in quickly when you are ahead. No need to set traps when you are short stacked. Just get it in.
Be prepared to get it in good and get called off and sucked out on occasionally. People don’t like to fold to short stacks because they know their exposure is limited. Sometimes they get lucky, but over time you get paid by people who have no business calling.
Tip #2: You are really looking for overpairs and/or top-pair-good-kick.
Hands like JJ+ and AK-AQ.
Put in a good sized raise, or hopefully a 3 bet, create a low SPR on the flop and get it all in if you hit your hand with top pair or overpair.
Obviously that is very few hands. 56 combos, about 4% of all hands. So you should basically be folding 95% of the time. Boring. And it doesn’t take much skill, aside from patience.
You could probably do the same with TT, AJ/KQ in limited spots, like CO v BN or in the blinds versus a steal raise.
You could wait around all nit=ght and inally get AK, raise limpers to $20 and get 3 callers ….. and miss the flop. Then what? Pot is $100 bucks and you only have $100 left and you don’t have a made hand and it’s 4 way.
Wait around all night for pocket Queens, raise limpers to $20 dollars, get 3 callers and an Ace comes on the flop. Now what?
You’ve just pissed away 1/3 of your stack on 2 hands, and that is IF you didn’t go crazy and shove on the flop and lose your entire short stack.
My advice is to just play with a full stack. A stack and a rebuy.
