Weaponize your short stack! You really can think about it differently. I must admit I kind of like playing a short stack. Maybe cause I'm pretty tight and patient most of the time, when I get short I switch gears. I say to myself, well now it's time to gamble! Nothing to lose anymore so let's give it a shot and see if we can run it up.
There's something extremely liberating about this. It's a rush. And this kind of fearlessness tends to make other players afraid. Often after showing a willingness to risk my stack I start getting walks in the big blind even as short stack.
A good thing about a short stack in the blinds (out of position) is that you get to realize your
equity more. If you have a bigger stack and you are in the blinds you are going to fold the better hand more often cause you are playing out of position. If you are short and shoving you get to realize your equity, so this is great. I love shoving a good hand from the blinds against a late open, or shoving in an unopened pot from the SB against a BB.
It really depends on the stage of the tourney, I'm really talking about later stages, but 10 bigs can still be a lot of chips (even 5 or 2.5 BB can have fold equity in the right spots. Sometimes people fold to tiny shoves, crazy but true. And while it's not necessarily correct in terms of
pot odds, when ICM is a factor it starts to make more sense.)
Think about it from the other players point of view - a 20 BB stack doesn't want to go down to 10BB without a hand, or 30BB to 20BB. If it's late in a tourney and say you are approaching final table or at final table people want to preserve their stacks. ICM is a factor and players want those money jumps. As short stack you don't have the ICM pressure cause you've got no where to go but up!