[RiverDood]

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Are you basically saying that you should almost always open raise in a short-handed game, as opposed to calling, in an effort to fold blinds?
At the Royal Vegas Poker 0.50-1.00 game I'm generally not raising with KQs, KJs, ATs in early to middle position. But, in the B&M looser games I raised with those hands in early to middle position most of the time.

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It depends enormously on the texture of the table. But if it's infested with limpers -- who won't cold-call two bets with J9o, A7o, etc, but who like to flock together and limp en masse to give one another decent odds on their draws -- then I'm a big fan of open-raising from middle position with exactly the kinds of hands you describe. In the ideal situation, everyone folds except one or both blinds, and then I've got the best position and the best hand.

The hands you mentioned play pretty well 3-way or 7-way. In the first case, you just want a pair; in the second case, you want your straight/flush to come in. They don't play as well 4-5 way, because there's more risk of being outdrawn by someone and not as many people to pay you off if you hit the jackpot. So at the B&M game, you're raising for value, expecting everyone to call. Online, you're raising to push out draws and protect your hand.

By the way, you're right that it's hard to target a table like this if you're playing five tables. I'm mostly two-tabling these days. It speeds up hands/hour and helps me cope with card-dead periods much better, but it still lets me read table conditions to some degree. At least on the good days it does. On the bad days, it gives me twice as many chances to spew chips.