When we take a break from matters such as high crime rates, corrupt governments and paying for all of those Christmas presents, we can also gripe about those horrible people who play the short stack in online cash games.
When I tried to play online cash games professionally there were times when I wanted to fix car bombs to individual players automobiles. They all had one thing in common.
They were all shortstackers.
I hated shortstackers.
Alex Scott is Head of Poker over at the Microgaming Poker Network (MPN). I like him. He is a Head of Poker, who is unafraid of offering opinion and engaging with the public. When so many of his ilk prefers the Ostrich approach, this guy likes to hold the leash of the sniffer dogs.
His latest opinion piece is called End of Shortstacking? The title made me want to dissect it with any cutlery I could find. It was a great piece of writing and a well-reasoned synopsis of an irritant that has been gnawing at this game for years.
Scott hired a bunch of nerds to pore over 2,273,022 MPN buy-ins to understand how popular and profitable 30bb stack sizes were when compared to 100bb stacks.
What he found was absorbing.
Not only did people prefer 100bb stack sizes (85% of cash game buy-ins), but players at those stack sizes were winning more money (47% of total winners compared to 44% sitting behind 30bb stacks).
That 3% doesn’t seem like a lot, but Scott covers that visual anomaly.
“That might seem close, but it isn’t because the amounts won and lost are significantly different. 100BB players make up 82% of players, but win 92% of the money. 30BB players make up 11% of players, but win just 4% of the money. A 30BB player loses over six times as much in their lifetime as a 100BB player, and 14 times as much per hand played.”
His analysis didn’t end there.
Scott also discovered that players who moved from 30BB strategy to 100BB strategy earned more money, and those that headed south lost more.
So, not only are short stackers like a tetanus shot in the ass, but they are using a strategy that’s not as profitable as the one most of us prefer. Scott and his team have decided to try a little experiement. They will make the Omaha Hi/Lo tables on the MPN 100BB only, and if there is no discernable negative effect, they plan to roll out the changes to Omaha Hi and eventually the Hold’em games.
Not everyone will be a fan.
But he has one in me.
