What's the deal with everyone hating short-handed?

Recreational players are accustomed to a form of poker play in which there are multiple limps, they get to see a flop and play their form of bingo in which they look how their hands match the flop. Skill in that game is knowing how to stack off when you have the absolute best hand, whereas less skill means you are stacking off with the fourth or fifth nuts.

When they are short, this means playing blind vs blind heads up or raising from late position in order to steal the blinds and then playing heads up pots in which many still don't understand that you don't need to have the absolute nuts to stack off. It also feels more conservative because you just get to invest one big blind every time you limp. Add the fact that you can't hit the bad beat if there are less than 5 players, something which is a major reason they come to the room, so they don't like playing shorthanded.

I've never heard of not being able to hit a bad beat with 5 players before is that true for all poker rooms?

Caesars: They must be 4 players at the start of the hand.

https://www.caesars.com/content/dam/uba/...

There's definitely a cutoff and some people hate it.

FWIW, the typical LLSNL game is quite raisey preflop, at least ime. I last did a tracking project in 2017 regarding this, noting 2/3rds of pots were raised preflop. I'm in the midst of doing another tracking project right now. I'm only 4 samples into a planned 10 samples of 1 hour, but currently still sitting at 2/3rds in 2025. My last sample had 21 of 24 hands raised, a very oddball sample that had both the highest raising percentage as well as the least amount of hands seen in an hour due to the constant multiwayness over multiple streets.

GitisamyththatthetypicalLLSNLgameseesalotoflimpedpots,imoG

It's a compromise they make. They like those cheap flops and then they are suckers for pot odds.

The other day, there were 4 or 5 limps ahead of me and I had already raised 4 or 5 times and shown KJo in one of them. So I raised to 35 and after two loose players in EP called, the others also had to call because "they had the odds"!

I personally don't mind short handed, even fine playing 3 handed (played a lot of home games 3-5 handed for hours) ... but it is higher variance and I doubt it's a good idea at a casino unless you have some expectation that more people will arrive.

Reasons I'm much less eager to play short in a casino:

1. The worst players almost universally don't like it, and will sit out or change games until the table fills. Also seen people refuse to sit at a 5 handed table. Lost count of the number of times people were like "well I was leaving in the next 30m anyway, so I might as well go now". In my experience you will pay/play the last big blind before the game breaks way more often than you'd assume, if you just keep playing and don't say anything.

2. Pay attention to how often people will randomly sit out at 9max, you just don't notice it because there's you and 7 other people ... when you go down to even 6max it's difficult not to notice. The worst players will notice, and you'll have cascades at even 6max where one guy goes broke (or even just takes a phone call) and another refuses to play 5 handed and then one more would be okay with 5 handed for a bit but is never playing 4 handed.

3. Almost every card room has slightly different rake/low-rake rules and you always need to request reduced rake (and I've basically never seen it refused), but more rake always happens automatically. The better dealers will remind/nudge players, but the worst dealers will make mistakes on the rake. It feels a lot like doing flips vs. the house but they win 55% of the time. There are also usually promo/comps. changes that happen at low rake, which some players will only be fine with if they don't know about them.

Most rooms don't announce it, but removing the $1 drop for bad beat is a very common way the rake is reduced.

Also the way the BBJP is distributed pretty much everywhere means that 3 players would be very weird where the guy who folded would be the best seat. Also casinos really don't like the assumed future PR nightmare of "we had a very big BBJP but then 3 guys played 666 hands an hour and hit it"

My old regular room will not reduce rake under any circumstances these days. Playing a 4-5 handed game with 10% rake capped at $15 was an unprofitable endeavour. It would greatly trouble me if players continued to play short in this room with the cap now at $25 but it wouldn't surprise me.

In my new regular room, they drop the rake to 5% from 10% but don't adjust the cap of 3bb. Dealers will stop dealing if there are less than 5 players because the BBJ won't apply.

Neither of these rooms are in the USA btw, where as a general rule there's more competition in the poker marketplace. In these other, less competitive markets, the casinos are less incentivised to keep games going, since players have no other place to go, even if the room has a bunch of empty tables and feels ghost-townish. Hence players will either sit around waiting for a game or play short-handed and become victims of the rake-trap.

Interesting comparison.

I used to play 10 handed, but that was so long ago I don't really remember what it was like. It was before I thought about the game as deeply as I do now, and so I never contemplated the implications of empty seats.

The room I play in mostly now is 9-handed, though I spent a decent amount of time in another room where it's 8-handed.

I think I sort of prefer 9 handed over 10 (too crowded) or 8 (worse blinds to rake ratio), though my recollection was that the empty seats in 8-handed games were filled faster than the empty seats at 9 handed games, and I don't seem to recall players in those 8 handed games being away for extended periods nearly as much as I seem to notice it happening in 9 handed games.

Part of the reason I prefer the 9 handed games has nothing to do with how many players there are. The room where it's 9 handed only allows a 2BB UTG straddle, whereas the 8-handed room allows straddling from anywhere. And one of the other 8-handed rooms has a lower max buy-in.

I see your point about it being less of a concern 10-handed. If a couple guys decide to go cross swords in the men's, we still have enough players to keep the game going.

One of the things that irks me about the room I frequent is they're not strict about the time given to players who leave the table. If someone asks, the dealer will tell them how long they get, but it seems like it takes an executive order to actually have someone's chips picked up in less than an hour and a half.

I would also love it if there was some mechanism that prevented players from leaving for extended periods, coming back to play for 10-15 minutes, then getting up and going for a walk again. That $hlt drives me nuts.

Anyone who leaves chips on the table for an extended period, then comes back and immediately picks up deserves to be shot, or at least given a lifetime ban, IMO.

Seems like it’s common at Bellagio with tables only being 8 handed at the most. It’s not unusual for 2 players to leave for a while to eat/smoke/take a phone call/etc. and then the table is 6 handed. But 6 (or even 5 if someone racks up and leaves) isn’t that short, and doesn’t feel as short as it used to when tables used to be 9 or 10 handed.

I used to see more hatred of playing short in limit hold’em games.

Shorthanded FL used to be my favorite game. People’s frequencies were absolutely terrible relative to optimal. Also, the blind structure and linear betting sizing makes stealing blinds or taking it down on the flop immensely profitable, incentivizing play with a lot of hands and really punishing people who play too tight passive.

It’s understandable why rec players would hate SH. They’ll just have to mix it up way too often, and in a mechanical game like FL, when your mechanics are inferior to someone else’s, you can stand to swing down fast.

By pure coincidence, I sat 6handed for probably a good solid hour out of the 4 hours I played last night (all with 4 to 5 tables running). Couldn't even attempt a sample size for my tracking project. Even confirmed with the floor whether it is possible to get a reduction on our $9+$1+$1 rake when the tables get short, but I already knew the answer.

GcluelessannoyingnightnoobG