I only recently started playing capped tables and I found there are some people only playing these tables (and some short stacked 40bb buy ins as well). One of those players in particular caught my eye.

Whenever he 3Bs he will basically ship every time (he 3Bs to around 95% of his effective stack) and he does so with a pretty wide range. Earlier today I was playing 4 handed on such a table (200NL) and he was doing this about 25% of the time.

So I decided to take a look in crEV as I am totally unprepared for this type of strategy. I used the BU and the BB as a proxy for the play. So whenever the BU opens to 2bb he will ship about 25% of the time in either SB or BB (I would guess a bit more in BB and less in SB). Given this 25% shipping range and my ~50% open range, he is profitable with all of his hands (these include 98s, K7, A8o, K9o and JTo to name a few) if I make the perfect call (55+, A8s+, A9o+, KJs+, KQo).

Does this mean I should tigthen up my opening range significantly? Or is this just the nature of such short stacked play, resulting in very loose ranges to get it in? My entire opening range is profitable as well in this scenario but does not take the SB player into account (which would of course impact my EV for opening quite a bit).

If I reduce the number of opening hands, my opponents weaker holdings start sliding into -EV, but my entire strategy is also losing EV (+4.25 compared to 4.50 with 50% open). Again SB play isn't taken into consideration but the drop in EV should tell us that it's likely better for us to keep opening 50% instead of 40%. So then should we just accept that our opponent has a great opportunity by shipping wide and picking up our open often? It seem like this is the case.