One key benefit of having a short stack is that players with larger stacks will often ignore, having bigger fish to fry. Even when you suddenly become aggressive after having played your very tight range for almost an hour, they may put you on a strong hand and not care.
You will often more than double your stack, but you can never lose more in a single buy-in than the size of the buy-in, often 30BB or a little more.
Of course sometimes you get coolered or sucked out on, as you will with any poker strategy. Your short stack will often induce players with worse hands to call your all ins, but it cannot prevent players with better hands from calling your all ins.
The old videos below about short stacking were intended to work with buy ins with 20BB. This very tight and very aggressive strategy was unbeatable at that stack size. So much so that players complained and poker sites raised the minimum buy ins.
Once online poker sites raised the minimum buy-in to 30BB, this strategy was largely abandoned. I reworked the 20BB strategy, loosening it up for 30BB. I ran hundreds of buy-ins trying out and perfecting my own default shortstack strategy.
That strategy is described and analyzed in my book and videos, but here is the old strategy so you can see the shoulders of the giants on which I stood: