In general, what strategy do you adopt when you play Fixed Limit O8 at a cash game, against 3 or 4 people?

Any advice would be appreciated.

I find SH games to be pretty loose-passive preflop and on the flop. I think it's imperative to raise with good-equity hands preflop, as it often won't be done for you. Raising simply because of position is not a strong strat in this situation.

Use standard strong limit 08/b strat, make sure you raise with good hands preflop, and any sort of slowplaying is simply losing value.

There was some discussion of this in these threads:

http://www.fullcontactpoker.com/poker-foru...p;#entry1420296
http://www.fullcontactpoker.com/poker-foru...p;#entry1474510

The above links come from my profile(so it link to my comment), so scroll to the top to read the whole thing.

the first link is one of the most +EV threads i've ever read on FCP (thanks checky). take what i said in the second link not as truth but as a different way to view the game.

while i still agree with what i said it probably won't be beneficial (-EV) to anyone who wouldn't think of it on their own. you need to have a much better understanding of the play than the thread leads you to.

shorthanded o8 in a nutshell:

in full ring LO8, the focus of the game is on drawing to the nuts and relying on your opponents to draw to 2nd nut hands so that you make money. there are some exceptions to this (i for instance tend to incorporate SH LO8 strategy into full ring play very often, admittedly sometimes at the expense of my BR ), but generally, nut-drawing is the name of the game. you'll limp potential nut hands often to get more dead money into the pot preflop, etc.

in shorthanded, however, you COMPLETELY drop literally all of that thinking. the aim now is to get as many hands as possible HU pre- or post-flop and pummel your opponent into submission when you feel like you have a very good shot at at least half the pot. here, the concept of the four card hand becomes absolutely paramount--if you are using all four of your cards in some way or another and the pot is HU, you can assume that you're getting at least half the pot and should cap every street in most situations (exceptions would be when a specific opponent has shown himself to only raise hands that are close to nut-nut, or that A3 low your opponent might have also makes a wheel straight for the high, etc.). if you've chosen a good table, you'll be around a lot of full ring players that will fold half pots to you very often and you'll achieve your scoops when your opponent folds rather than your very rare wheel-nut-flush type hands. and if people do call you down or raise you with half pot hands, well, that's fine. you don't lose any money, and you have really gained a lot of bets the next time you do flop a wheel and that guy raises you with the big straight while you're freerolling a flush.

so yeah, you make money in two ways in SH LO8:

1. you get people to fold and win whole pots when you really only deserve half.
2. people think that you're such a retarded maniac by playing half pot hands so aggressively that you get paid off with 5-6 more bets when you do actually have a very good 2-way hand.

there is a LOT more variance to SH LO8 play than full ring, btw (i regularly go thru 50-60BB swings over 4-500 hand sessions), so maintaining focus and not going on tilt becomes a lot more important as well.