It’s actually Monday morning when I write this. My sleep patterns were disrupted, and I played from 3 AM to 8 AM instead of my typical hours. The game was fairly full when I got there, and rather rapidly became four handed (me, another local pro, a local regular and a sort of local guy who was drinking a bit too much).

For some reason, people think when the gamer gets short-handed, they must play every hand, never lay down a blind and call to the river with anything. I do not and did not play this way. In fact, since I rarely held a hand of any sort, I almost never played anything. A relentless stream of 82 can make you look like a rock, but shorthanded, these guys were committed to every pot regardless of how few I played. So most pots were three-handed with me folding. This is not how I typically play, but I am not going to enter with trash hoping to get lucky.

Short-handed hold’em is a game of high cards, and preferably two of them. Yes, I know all about blind aggression, but it does not work anywhere near as well as its proponents think. Yes, I made a move or two, some successful and some not, but they were rare in themselves.

For example, I raise from the button with 10-8. Aggressive (drinking) local three-bets from the blind. I call. He bets the AQ2 flop. I put him on nothing and, as I look like a tight player, call planning to raise him off his nothing on the turn. Turn is a seven, he bets, I raise and he calls. (Bad for me). River is a ten. He checks and I check since I no longer need to bluff. He reveals 97 (pair of sevens) and I show my pair of tens to take it down. My read was good but he hit a pair so I had to draw out. He is angry I sucked out, and everyone else thinks I am nuts and just raising with nothing which nets me several bets later.

Anyway, that play was rare as I mostly watched. Eventually I picked up a hand (JJ) that held up for a nice pot. A little more give and take and I walked away with $1,000 of hard-earned money. I am not saying whether it was skill or luck; I am saying that I did not play many hands, played the ones I did aggressively (naturally) and won for the session without being in very many pots.

Take a look at your short-handed game. Do you play short-handed so you can play many hands or just play hyper-aggressive poker, or are you really trying to optimize your earn by continuing to play selective (though less so), aggressive (perhaps a bit more so) poker?