When sitting down to a typical No Limit Hold’em game there are nine or ten players at the table, which means a lot of cards are out there right from the beginning. With twenty cards out of a 52 card deck dealt out in the first round, you have a lot of chances to be beat and dominated by other players at the table, no matter how strong your hand is. Even if you are dealt aces there are a lot of ace-buster hands out there that could have been dealt and are just waiting for the flop to crack your hand. But what about short handed games? With five or six players in stead of nine or ten, the starting odds of being beat at the start are practically cut in half.

If you are dealt a decent hand in a short handed game, you can feel safe to play it like a very good hand. The odds of your Jacks being beat if there are only, say, four players at a table are much, much slimmer than if there were eight or ten. Does this mean you should play every hand like a monster, however? Not at all, because what often happens is that although it may be small odds that you are beat, if you are, you are like beat bad.

You should play more hands than in full games and play them more aggressively, but do not ignore the other players. If you have pocket Jacks on a flop of A-K-J and your opponent is coming over the top of you, and by the river the board reads A-K-J-Q-9, you might want to fold to an all in from a tight player who is telling you “I’ve got the straight”.

Short handed games give you the opportunity to widen your gap (from David Sklanasky’s Gap Theory) in tournament games, and play more hands more aggressively in cash games. Don’t ignore other players, but don’t ignore the fact that the odds are in your favor with good hands more than in full sized games.