There are implied odds multipliers such as for suited connectors villain's stack has to be at least X times the preflop raise amount and for suited aces it's Y, etc.

What I found is that those numbers stop working with eff stacks > $400. I've never seen anyone with a stack over $600 get stacked in one hand. I think even the biggest of donks won't pay you off with let's say $600 stack unless it's a hardcore cooler like boat over boat or something and how often do those happen?

So my idea is when eff stacks are over $400, just do the implied odds numbers as if the stacks were $400 because no one will pay you off with bigger stacks in practice.

What do you think?

It can because so few 1/2 players have any experience with deep stack play. This is something you really need to evaluate on a person by person basis though, because different people respond differently to getting into deep stack situations. A common case, and what you seem to be seeing, is people who think about absolute bet size rather then relative bet size. People who think $50 is a huge bet both when the pot is $50 and when the pot is $200 are not going to pay off big very often but can be bluffed out of big pots if your willing to bet big. Real stationary players, on the other hand, are great villains to target with implied odds hands because they will pay off huge bets with marginal hands. I have seen stationary villains lose as much as $600 in one hand with just top pair because they couldn't fold it even though a nit shoved a dry board on the river. Players who like to bluff can create all kinds of weirdness and spew off their money when deep, because they will often bet bigger and bluff more often when they have a deep stack even when there is little chance of a bluff working. Some players go the other way and become nitty when deep because they are afraid of losing it. There really just isn't a universal rule here, but what you mention is one of the most common reactions.

Ya it's villain dependent. I've stack someone for $600 when he had an awful 2 pair in a 4 straight board. Just depends.

You appear to be incorrectly understanding SPR (Stack to Pot Ratio) considerations.

Lets say at a 1/2NL table you are playing against a player with effective stacks at 300bb ($600). That player opens to $20 and you are the lone caller with 76s. Given SPR analysis, you see the flop with an effective SPR of 14.5:1. This is a great place to be with a hand like 76s, and its a very difficult place to be with a hand like AA.

When playing deep, you are way better off to look at SPR as a guide, instead of rules-of-thumb like 15x for setmining and 25x for suited connectors.

You'll notice that SPR always scales with stack depth.

The rules-of-thumb really are not supposed to be useful for deep stack play. They are merely a way of determining a reasonable floor for which certain hands should be played.

ETA: And I LOL'd when you said you've never seen someone with 300bb get stacked w/o a huge cooler. Happens all the time... All you need is a little alcohol, testosterone, and something to light a match.

Good advice so far. I LOL'd at the stacking, too.

I've stacked someone at 1/3 for $1100 with AA on a KK7ss flop. He folded, so don't know what had. He was a maniac and called my $300 pre and flop shove.

+1

You are correct in your understanding. As SPR gets higher and higher the stack-off probabilty in a single hand plateaus.

The question is, how do we react this?

Hint: what does Tom Dwan do when a tight player opens UTG and Tom is otb with 97 and they are 400bb eff?

If they're folding everything but the nuts super deep post flop the clear adjustment is to run huge bluffs against them

your mostly right but it's completely villain dependent. Just this weekend a guy shipped a little more than $600 to me on a 3 j 4 3 board w/ AJ, no fd, another player in the hand folded AA after putting in ~1/3 of their stack.

Compared to say 2003-2010, yeah no one stacks off anymore unfortunately, but their still are players out there who will, there just fewer and further in between.(think guy who never folds a set or guy who never folds a flush)

I've been dealing with this general issue myself recently. I give a ton of action and still seem to have a hard time getting value.

I wanted to have a discussion about this w/ the guys who play regularly. Basically how/ what do we do when people don't stack off as light in general. the players get better every day. People cash out much quicker ie less and less players sit deep and give it all back. Guys double up, fold for a half hour and rack up. The fish on a heater doesn't give you a chance to get your money back more often then not. Guys absolutely refuse, REFUSE to play short handed, which is terrible for all of us. Nowadays I have to cruise around town to find "good" games. You can't just walk into any room and sit down w/ a table full of droolers, give action/get action/ collect, and head to the bar. you gotta seek them out, which is annoying to. Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I wonder what others think about this.

I'm not going to argue that this is good practice, but it seems to be working for me over the past year or so: Very generally speaking... here are a couple things I've been doing to turn a meh table into a good table.

I spazz out every few orbits. Play TAG for 4-6 orbits, then play a SLAG orbit or two. If you are paying attention, you'll know when my SLAG orbit is starting because I usually top-up to the max on my button when beginning the SLAG orbit.

I play probably 50/30 against anyone who is wins a few good pots and becomes 200-300bb deep if I can get in position on them, and when I think the rest of the table will not exploit me by 3b light.

I actively try to get someone to be the table "bad-guy" -- usually its the guy who just recently doubled up to 200-300bb and its he whom I'm going to start targeting. Get him to tilt and try to get the rest of the table to start focusing on him. I am always careful to keep it good-natured, but if I can put someone on tilt by saying a few stupid things, being a little loud and obnoxious, rooting against his team, and get the table ruckus to pick up, it is always good for the game. The best scenario is when the bad-guy pushes back and some banter picks up. Again, I always keep it civil, even if the other guy goes too far. But of course, sometimes I become the "bad-guy", and that's fine too.

Play your super premium hands much stronger preflop. Open raise bigger and 3b like 5x or more. Bloat the hell out of the pot preflop when you have a super premium hand. If they'll call $12, then make it $16. If they start to call $16, then make it $21 -- and keep going.

IMO... the games are getting better.

Remember that back in 2008, fish were taking out 2nd mortgages on their homes to go on vacation with. That simply does not happen currently, and IMO, this is the biggest reason why the games are not as good as they used to be.

But the economy is settling out. Folks are starting to get their discretionary spending back on line. And the poker games will recover as the liquidity in the player pool improves.

I interpret this as simple table adjustment. I hope you can recognize when the maniac angle isn't necessary. If the game is good, then why switch gears? I've developed the ability to play however I need to. I have a pretty eclectic player pool so on any given day the full range of VPIP's are required of me, but I'd like to think I don't show up with a plan to play Slag every three orbits to liven the game etc.

I think you have a point, but you're not entirely right.

First of all, I can think of 4 times, just off the top of my head, when I have stacked someone for $600 or more at 1/2. Only one of those times was boat over boat. Other times I've extracted $500 off a guy with unimproved KK on an ace-high board, etc., so I think it's not quite true that super-deep stacks never come into play.

I would say that when you get to a point in the game where you think you can't get stacks into play, you need to do something to change the game dynamic so that people are more willing to do so. One way is to start straddling (especially when it gets others to straddle) and making small pot-sweetener raises a lot when you enter a pot. If all the bets are doubled in size, all of a sudden people will either start to see their $600 stack as being "shorter", or you will collect a lot more money when they fold to your bluffs. You should be happy with either result.

But that being said, it is definitely true that sometimes stacks get so deep that people won't want to play for them anymore. The question is, how to adjust to that? It isn't just to start assuming that parts of the stacks are off-limits.

I kind of disagree with the pot sweetener concept. If you're going to raise why not raise a good amount? How is it easier to get stacks in with a raise to $5 rather than a raise to $10?

I look at implied odds as the likelihood and extent to which villain will pay you off if you make your hand. Stack is the upper bound on that number but it's not the number itself. Am I wrong?

This is part of the art of implied odds. It ends up having to do with what the villain perceives as, "a lot of money" and their budget. When you cross that threshold for the villain, the hand strength moves up considerably. Combined with what they perceive as a big hand, it allows one to maximize value and bluff effectively.

In the case of $400 and a 1/2 game, it is a lot of money to many players in that game. So I agree that many players will not go that high with what they perceive as a good, not great hand.

However, it can also be true for someone with only $60. If it is 8 pm, their ride isn't leaving until 11 pm and losing it means sitting around for 3 hours, they will be as protective of that $60 as someone else is of $400.

I always try to watch someone's wallet when they rebuy. If they have a lot of crisp $100s, they are going to be willing to reload. If you see someone digging out $20s and $10s with the wallet nearly empty, they are less likely to release it easily.

When stacks are $600, $10 is less than 2% of the stacks. It's the mathematical equivalent of making it $5 when you are $300 deep. So you could consider that a pot sweetener.

In fact, this speaks to what I'm really trying to get at: with $600 stacks, a "good amount" should be maybe $30, give or take a red chip or two, not the usual $10-15 that you see in most 1/2 games. To do this over a $2 blind is absurd...unless you're raising over a straddle or over someone's $5 pot sweetener raise. So I like to try to set up scenarios where this does in fact happen.

The only advantage of making it $5 instead of $10 is that if you get played back at preflop, you can still play a lot of speculative hands for the price of a 3bet. (With a $10 raise initially, and the subsequently bigger 3bet, that is a lot harder to justify.)

I was being arbitrary with my numbers. It's the concept I'm worried about.

The "concept" of doing what? Making small pot sweetener raises that are like limps except that all the subsequent bets are bigger?

With normal-sized stacks (like $200 or $300) this might not make sense, but we're talking about a scenario where people's stacks are so big that they won't want to put them in play. One way to counteract that is to take them out of their comfort zone by making all your bets bigger starting with preflop. So anytime you want to limp, maybe make it $5. Anytime you want to raise to $10, maybe make it $20 instead.

I'm not advocating that when you pick up KK preflop and $600 deep you make it $5 instead of the usual $15. What I am saying is that all the bets should be bigger when you are deeper. That means making pot sweetener raises with hands you'd normally limp with, so the table is used to the fact that you are betting bigger than normal. Then a stack-sized shove appears less out of the ordinary when it does come.

Concept accepted.

I normally see these raises with normal stacks which is just dumb.

I also don't limp all that often (probably more than i should still).

This is a commone mistake that online players make playing live. They think im a fish if I limp.

The better you are post flop the more hands you should be playing preflop. If im at a passive table im limping so often.

I don't think you understand what I'm getting at.

Boy, you really DO have a hardon for this hand....

This is villain and situation dependent, but generally speaking, the deeper you are, the better your implied odds. In every situation for any stack depth, you still need to be careful not to overestimate implied odds, and part of that is because its hard to massage a pot to get more and more chips in, and to Venice's great post, it really depends a lot on the villain type and situation . But as a general statement, deeper is better, though obviously with some diminishing returns, which you have to judge at the table. I think you understand that.

What's more important and interesting is this question:

At what stack depth do implied odds become reverse implied odds?

I'm not sure it happens at 400BB, though it probably does. But it certainly happens deeper. For example:

100BB Deep:
Take a hand like 44. If you make a set 100BB deep, you almost always want to stack off unless board texture is just horrible.

The more chips that go into the 100BB pot, the greater your cEV. And when you stack off, you usually win the most.

1,200BB Deep:
Take 44 again. If you make a set 1,200BB deep, you probably do not want to stack off on any board texture.

The more chips that go into the 1,200BB pot, your cEV starts to turn from positive to negative. And when you stack off, you usually lose the most.

Basically, at some stack depth, there's some inflection point where IO becomes RIO for a given situation, holding, board, etc, villain and situation dependent. Obviously the deeper you are, the more you want/need hands that can make nut hands because as you go deeper, deeper, and even deeper, it starts to become a game of nuts vs second nuts.

They don't stop working, they change. There are variables that can affect implied odds, stack sizes are one of them; position is another.