Some of you may have seen me ratholing 200NL the past few days, and thought "WTF?" Well, I had a look at faintinggoat's vid in this thread: www.cardrunners.com/members/forum/ubbthreads.php, and thought I'd give it a try. I just started playing full-ring in the past month and it seems like the shortstackers at 100NL FR have been giving me hell lately, so I decided to get in a few K hands as a shortstacker. Let's call it research. I did a little research with shortstacking 25NL a few months ago, but quickly lost interest, so I decided to give 200NL a shot to make it more interesting.

As it turns out, it's not that easy and kind of f'ing nerve racking at times. When I started out, I think I had my opening and re-raise shoving ranges off a little and was leaking pretty bad. I think shortstacking is kind of educational as far as getting a very good read on people's opening ranges and re-raise calling ranges. I found it pretty interesting. As I went along, I kind of started to get the hang of it, but there were plenty of bumps in the road. It's amazing what people call you with, and I got pretty pissed a few times when I had like 4 hands in 10 minutes get in as a 70%+ favorite and get sucked out on. In the end, though, you definately get plenty of +EV opportunites. One valuable thing I think I did learn is how much worse it is to have AQ vs AK. I was leaking bad w/AQ in the beginning and ended up taking it out of most of my range.

I think the most valuable thing for me is that I now have a lot better idea about what these little fellas are doing. I also think I'll now be a lot better at determining the good short-stackers from the crappy ones. I love seeing some terrible short-stacker limp shove like 15bb's with something like 44 (I'm pretty sure this is very bad).

I was going to try like 10K hands 8-tabling with a short stack, but I got pretty tired and fed up with it after about 4K hands. I might play a little more in the next few days. Oh, and I guess I wasn't truly ratholing. I would buy in for 20bb's and usually not leave until I had 60+bb's. I would definately stay and play deeper if I had position on a huge spew-tard or if the table in general was very good. Below are my favorite suckout hand and my best robusto hand of my short-stacking venture. BTW, I ended up making about $200 in 4600 hands for a mean 1.09bb/100 winrate. Weeeeeee!

Goooooooooo!!!!!!!! http://www.pokerhand.org/?2329886

Yaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!! http://www.pokerhand.org/?2329893