[surfinillini]

All this debate about short stack buy in has got me thinking.

I'm going to try this out today here in LA and post a little summary later.

-surf

edit: Is the this the article you were talking about:

Tell us about this system you’ve come up with.

I worked on this game theory, just for kicks. I worked out a guaranteed way to win $28 an hour in Vegas, which is a decent living for a lot of people, but it doesn’t really interest me much. But I needed to see if it would work.

There are so many maniacs at the casino. A lot of people watch TV and think they have figured out poker because they’ve watched it for an hour. They don’t realize it’s 12 hours of shooting and they’ve edited it down to an hour. All you see is bluffs gone bad and maniac moves that go well – and that’s not real poker.

So I worked it out with millions of simulations on the computer and then went and did it for a seven month period, five days a week, and it came out at $28.64 an hour. Here’s how it works. You play the low blind games. I would say the best ones to play are the $2/$5 games. In a low blind game, a bunch of chips is not strength, it’s vulnerability – unless you’re one of the best players around (and if you’re one of the best players around you wouldn’t be playing the $2/$5 games!). Too many people want to look at a flop and anybody playing the $2/$5 has only a certain level of ability. That means that their big chip stack in front of them, if they stay there long enough, is gonna get sucked out from under them.

What is the only move a pro would make if he was on a short stack? He would go all-in if he had A-A, K-K, Q-Q or A-K. So I’ve simplified the game down to one move, because that is the move the best pro in the world would make.

So, you buy in for $140 – let everyone else have the big stacks. You sit there and wait for one of those four hands. If you’ve got a maniac to your left, you limp in and let him raise it and go all-in when it comes back to you. You’re going to see one of those combos on average once in about 43 or 44 hands. So, say you’ve blinded down to about $120. If no one calls you when you go all in, you’ll have probably picked up about forty dollars. So now you’re at $160. Then you’ll blind down another $20 or so (your original buy-in), before you get a shot at it again. If someone does call you the first time, and you win, you’re at about $240 and you’re $100 ahead, so you cash out and put your name back on the list, or walk across the street to another casino and do the same thing.

It’s just money management. You cash out and buy back in for $140 and do the same thing again. It’s foolproof. It’s chump bait, because if you’re down to $140 and there are all these big stacks, and there’s already $60 in the pot, someone’s going to call you with a KJ suited or whatever.

Chris “Jesus” Ferguson – who’s a good friend of mine – took a dollar and turned it into $20,000 over a five-month period using my system – just for a lark in his spare time. Isn’t that funny? They’re a little tighter online than they are in Vegas, so what you want to do is play four screens at the same time, each with sixty dollars. Doing that will actually make you more money. That comes to $37 per hour and some change.