Nobody wants to be the short stack. It’s like being the new boy at school. You’re isolated, picked on, targeted and bullied, leaving you all alone in the darkness… (Sorry, too many emotional scars.) Despite all this, playing as the short stack is actually fairly simple, but can be hard to do correctly in the heat of battle.

The first thing to understand is that if you’re a short stack your chips are more valuable than at any other time. Hopefully this is intuitively obvious, but in case it’s not let me elaborate a bit. If you win the tournament you end up with all the chips, but you don’t get all the money in the prize pool (sadly).

So as your chip stack increases above average, each individual chip is worth less, enabling you to play a little looser.

But as a short stack, the opposite is true.