'Improve Your Poker Now!' by Topher Goggin and Alexander Fitzgerald is available as an ebook or paperback from D&B Poker.
Following the exciting conclusion to the 2025 World Series of Poker, it’s time to reflect on lessons from another summer on the felt. I try to do this every year. Often I recognize something I did poorly and need to improve. Other times I notice something from the rest of the field that could help me, and hopefully you.
Time after time in Vegas this year, I saw the same principle reinforced: When your stack gets short, make them beat you. Don’t give up, and never give your tournament away. No matter how dire things look, fight to the bitter end.
'Be a cockroach'
This idea first popped up thanks to my friend Miles Barnum. Miles is a multi-talented actor and singer who also happens to be an excellent poker player with over thirty WSOP cashes. This summer, he did plenty of 'Everyday Winning' (the title of his latest song), cashing six of 12 bullets including back-to-back deep runs in early July.
Miles relayed a piece of advice he received once from high-stakes crusher Esther Taylor (below) while he was en route to a final table. She told him that when he got short-stacked, which would inevitably happen, his job was to 'be a cockroach.' Don’t make it easy for them. Scratch. Claw. Make them stomp you out.
It’s a terrific image to guide short-stacked play, but it’s frequently forgotten by amateurs. Time after time, I saw players get short after a tough beat and all but give up. The next thing you knew they were tilt-rejamming seven-high or calling off their stack the first time they saw a face card. They’d bust, then throw up their hands as if they couldn’t have done anything about it.
Don’t give it away
Too many amateurs suffer from the perception that drifting below 10 big blinds is some sort of death sentence.
That attitude is curious, since nearly everyone knows someone with a 'chip-and-a-chair' comeback story. It’s easy to think of times a player seemed to just tread water in the background, hiding as an unnoticed short stack, then got hot at the right time to grab a huge prize.
Those stories aren’t one-offs. They’re everywhere. Just this year, Michael Wang (berlow) won a PLO bracelet after being down to less than one big blind. Instead, these tales reflect a simple poker truth: 'Short' and 'out' are far from the same.
In the movie The Princess Bride, Billy Crystal’s Miracle Max famously says that “Mostly dead is slightly alive.” Nowhere is that truer than at a poker table. If you have chips, you have hope. To capitalize, you must become a pest. Be that annoying party guest that just won’t get up and leave.
The road back is shorter than you think
Computer analysis constantly verifies that tiny tournament stacks are much more valuable than their proportionate share of the chips in play. It’s true. Think about how short the road from a microstack back to health can actually be.
Assume you lose a flip and get chopped down to a paltry 1.5bb. Doom, right? Not necessarily.
Let’s say that in the next hand, the action folds to you in the cutoff. You shove in your last 1.5bb with 
offsuit. The button raises to 6bb, conveniently providing you protection, and the blinds fold. The button flips over 
, and you flop a ten and stay alive. Easy game.
Notice that you didn’t just double up to 3bb. With the blinds and big blind ante, you actually have 5.5bb. A few hands later you open jam with 
offsuit. Action folds to the big blind, who shrugs, says “pot odds,” and calls with 
offsuit. You’re a favorite this time, and you win again.
In two hands, you’ve moved from crumbs to 12.5bb. Now let’s say action at the table gets frisky, forcing you have ride through the blinds and fall back to 10bb. But midway through the next orbit you find 8-8. Again you rip it in. This time the player behind you rejams for 23bb. The others fold, the villain shows off, and your eights hold up.
In just three hands, you’ve gone from a 1.5bb death spiral to a playable 22.5bb stack. That’s all it takes. Yes, things went your way, but it didn’t require some miraculous run of cards. You did it with T-7o, A-6o, and 8-8.
It won’t always work out like that, but that’s not the point. The key is that all you need to recover, even from a tiny stack, is a modest bit of good fortune. It doesn’t require a movie-script string of miracles.
Bits of good fortune happen a lot. I’m proof. I was under 10bb on the bubble of the $300 Gladiator event and went on to finish in the top 1% of the field. Two days later in a $600 event, I was under 6bb on dinner break, and rallied to both cash and move on to day two.
Dictate the action
So you’re ready to dig in your heels. Now what?
The best way to 'make them beat you' is to get your money in first. The great Dan Harrington (below) pointed this out in his classic Harrington on Hold ‘em, emphasizing the importance of having what he called the 'initiative' when short. This 'initiative' just meant being the aggressor when your chips go into the pot, forcing other players to react to you rather than vice versa.
Your requirements for calling off your stack should remain high. Once you call it off, you only have one way to win: Showdown. That means a lot of trips to the showers. Plenty of hands that you would be happy to jam yourself become folds once someone shows interest in the pot.
When you move first, you force your opponents to find a hand they want to play. Not just against you, but against the rest of the table as well. And even if they pick up a calling hand, they still have to beat you on a five-card runout. Unless you run into an overpair, you’ll rarely be worse than a 2-to-1 underdog. By focusing on being the aggressor and only calling off when strong, you can minimize your bust-out risk while keeping pace with the blinds.
One caveat. Like any poker principle, this can be taken too far. The big money is in winning tournaments, and the only way to win is to get all the chips. Sooner or later, you have to play cards. But there’s a big difference between patiently passing up marginal situations and forgoing clearly profitable spots. Most amateurs err on the side of impatience, but not all. Don’t overcorrect if you’re tight.
Try the lobster
Here’s a final analogy. When I played tennis in high school, my doubles partner and I had a nemesis team we regularly faced. All they did was hit lobs — slow, high percentage, defensive shots. We called them the 'lobsters.'
On paper, my partner and I were better than the lobsters. We had better serves, better ground strokes, and better net games. The lobsters never took risks or tried to hit it past us. They just found ways to keep points going while they waited for us to make a mistake. Sooner or later, we usually did.
Battling the lobsters was like playing tennis versus your garage door — every ball came back. Eventually one of us would get frustrated, go for a big shot, and airmail it into the back fence. The lobsters didn’t have a ton of tools at their disposal — just like a short-stacked poker player — but they brilliantly used their limited options to let us beat ourselves.
When you get short at a poker table, be like the lobsters. Be a cockroach. As long as you are 'slightly alive,' stay at the party until somebody makes you leave. Take pleasure in watching your adversaries lose their patience and punt off their stacks while you keep collecting money. Grind the best outcome out of every tournament you play. Your results will thank you.
