microstakes, short stack on bubble, tight passive opponents

[knaplek]

Hi, I've been struggling recently with finding myself 4 or 5 handed in an stt with a 10bbish stack against very tight-passive opposition. Obviously this this is great with a big stack as I can just take twice my share of blinds and jump out of the way whenever anyone plays back at me. It's pretty good with a really short stack too since I have a good chance to get back into contention without a showdown. But with about 10bbs I feel like I have to shove if I'm going to play at all, and if I'm pushing a wide range the other players can do pretty well by just sitting back and waiting to call me with premium hands, leaving me busted on the bubble far more often than I would like.

What's the best thing to do about this? Should I be tightening up my shoving range to just a little looser than theirs and hope to drift into the money? Should I consider raising to say 2.5bbs preflop rather than shoving (haven't really experimented enough to know how often this would work). Or do you think I should just keep being very aggressive and hope I can get more 1sts to make up for probably fewer cashes?

[taipan168]

Hi and welcome to FTR, it's good to have you here.

You're right, if you have 10x BB, your only move (unless you're trapping with AA or KK which I would not do very often) is to shove or fold preflop.

if I'm pushing a wide range the other players can do pretty well by just sitting back and waiting to call me with premium hands

By definition, if opps are waiting to call you with premium hands, this means that most of the time they're folding and letting you take the blinds (which if you have 10x BB represents a 15% addition to your stack).

Don't raise 2.5x BB preflop - if you get called you're pretty much committed to the pot whether you hit or not and if you have to give up you lose a lot of value, not just because you have less chips, but you have less FE as well.

I suggest that you download SNG Wiz, which has a 30 day free trial period, and run some hands through it. It will give you a good sense as to when you should be pushing and when you should be folding. Just be aware that you need to adjust the pushing/calling ranges of opps to suit your reads/the table situation/stack sizes etc.

Otherwise, post specific hands for us to look at, there are a lot of factors (stack sizes, position, reads, sizes of the blinds etc.) to consider.

[knaplek]

thanks for the input. I'll try the programme you mention to get a better idea of what kind of range I should be playing normally. Do you think against these tighter opponents I should still open up from this range like you would with a few more chips, or does play with such a short stack become almost entirely dependent on cards and position rather than opponents?