[Ginogino]

Brianmarc:
The question, it seems to me, is how many players see the flop when you raise preflop. Say you raise UTG with your smallish pair and 3 players call. With 3 hands against you, any flop with two cards 8 or above confronts you with a substantial risk that one of your three opponents has made a better pair than yours. This makes it hard for you to bet your hand as strongly as you'd ordinarily like to. So often in shorthanded play you are betting your opponent's cards rather than your own -- with each extra opponent you have to give up that strategy to a greater extent.

If your raise gets the hand headsup, then you can play aggressively -- especially when the flop comes rags or when there's just one high-ish card. I find that pocket 6's (or the like) is a good hand for a re-raise against a solid UTG's open-raise (and it helps if UTG is predictable enough that you know what a 4-bet means).

Of course, the poker gods rarely give you the ideal hand at the ideal moment. But if you find that your raise (with small-ish pocket pairs) isn't cutting down the field enough, you might want to save this strategy for another game.

Gino