Push-fold charts for short stacks in SNG
Below 10bb in an SNG, poker collapses to two buttons: shove or fold. Postflop trees exit the building. What remains is a lookup table indexed by position, stack in bb, antes on/off, and players left to act. Pros do not «sense» these spots — they match hand to cell and live with variance.
How to read the matrix without drowning
Standard push-fold charts color cells: green shove, red fold, sometimes yellow marginal. Rows are stack depth (15bb → 5bb); columns are position (UTG → SB). Antes widen shove ranges because dead money in the pot increases fold equity — typically +2–4 percentage points of hands at 10bb.
Measure stack in bb only
Ignore chip counts in dollars. 7.5bb is 7.5bb whether the buy-in is $3 or $60.
Identify effective stack
Your shove range uses min(your stack, biggest cover stack left to act) — not always your chips.
Find position column
BTN and CO shove widest; UTG and MP narrow sharply. SB vs BB is its own micro-chart.
Match hand, execute
Borderline cells: shove if fold equity ≥ 45% estimated. Otherwise follow chart — discipline over heroics.
The three leaks charts fix immediately
- UTG panic shove with K9o at 10bb — chart says fold; you donate ~1.2bb EV.
- BTN nit fold with A2s at 7bb — chart says shove; passivity bleeds fold equity.
- BB loose call vs SB shove at 6bb with Q8o — top 15% defense, not 40%.
Bubble adjustment without inventing new math
On the money bubble (4 players, 3 paid), charts tighten for medium stacks and loosen slightly for covering stacks applying pressure. Short stacks (≤8bb) still shove chart ranges — survival ICM matters less when folding bleeds you to 3bb next orbit. I mark bubble SNGs in my ledger and compare shove compliance only at ≤10bb; that single filter cleaned ~4% ROI over 150 games.
I remember the KJo shove that the chart said was a fold
I remember jamming KJo from MP at 9bb because «I had to do something before blinds ate me.» Chart: fold. Result: called by AQ, bust. Expected cost vs folding: ~0.8bb. Multiply by six similar «activity» jams that session — ~5bb burned, exactly one double-up worth of equity gone without winning a pot. The ledger row still says KJo MP 9bb = red.
Tape the 10bb chart to your monitor, run five NUTS POKER turbos without a single «feel» shove, and log compliance in your ledger. Short stacks are arithmetic — the players who treat them that way cash more often.
