Hello, quick q.

For those of us who have limited bankroll. I always buy in 100bb and keep around 100bb in my pocket.

Every time I fall off 70bb, I recharge till 100bb, which is rare. But usually this my line in regards to buy ins.

How many BBs do you usually buy in for?

I used to be the guy who always bought in for 100bbs (which was the maximum BI in my game although it has since been bumped up to 133bbs) and topped up after every hand.

I'm now the guy who always buys in for 67bbs and tops up after every hand.

I had early success using the first method, but as my game conditions changed and I became more fully comfortable / aware of what my personal wheelhouse is, I've had decent success using the latter method.

If you're the best player at the table and you have a tremendous advantage over everyone at the table the deeper you get and have a complete handle on things, then you'll likely want to sit as deep as you can. If that's not the case, you may want to sit shorter to simplify your decisions. The key is to be very honest in your evaluation of yourself, your opponents and your strengths versus weaknesses.

GgoodluckG

If you are a good player and can make good decisions in tough spots, then I would recommend buying in for the full amount and staying topped up. The more money you have in your stack, the more money you can win, at least until you have become the biggest stack at the table.

If you are on a limited bankroll, know what you are doing, and have patience, you can buy in for a small amount and play a short-stack strategy. It's boring as hell, but it works. Short-stackers who know what they are doing have a significant edge in the game, but your upside is limited unless you stick around after you double up. A lot of posters here hate short-stackers; part of the reason why is that it is both tough and unrewarding to beat a good short-stacker.

(Most players with short stacks, though, don't know what they are doing, and are sitting ducks. It is easy to beat them, but just as unrewarding.)

+1 to all of this but especially to bolded. OP don't be that guy.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...ve-nl-1662620/

read this, it will help

It's best not to play at all on a limited bankroll. However, if you have a job or just a source of income that you're living off of, the amount of cash you need on hand can be much lower than what you normally hear.

For example, if your job covers all the necessities and provides 500bb+/month for discretionary spending and you have 500bb+ saved up already, you should feel decently rolled. I'd buy in to cover as many of the weaker players as possible.

Now say you have like 300bb saved up and your income allots you 200bb/month for poker, don't play. Wait till you have about 1000bb saved up, then start taking shots.

In general, buying in shorter won't significantly decrease your risk of ruin, but it will significantly lower your win-rate. Say you have 500bb total. You can dust off 10 buy ins of 50bb each just as easily as you can 5 buy ins of 100bb. With a shorter stack you're going to be getting all the chips in within the first two steets, meaning you'll almost never have a lock on the pot. I guess you can play like a total nit, but again, that'll lower your winrate and enjoyment of the game. You'll also stunt your growth, so when you do make it to deeper play, you won't be as good as you can. Honestly, you can have a lot of fun with a $100 deposit on ignition playing the penny stakes. You'll feel secure and will likely play against players tougher than 1/2 live, so when you do have the money to play it, you'll have a greater edge.

This is almost true. It starts out being smart, but then it goes off the rails with wrongness.

Everything that is written about bankroll management in poke is written with the expectation that replenishing a bankroll is difficult. Such is the case when someone is playing for a living, without external income stream.

But when you have an income that more than covers your life expenses, then the surplus can be used to fund your poker play. All of a sudden you don't need a bankroll, because you have a cash flow.

Losing an entire bankroll is a calamity that will put a player out of action indefinitely. But if you have one buy-in per week of discretionary money, you can put that single buy-in into play, and if you happen to lose it, well, you are out of action for a single week, until you get your next buy-in of discretionary money. And if you happen to double up, well, next week you have three buy-ins!

Key concept to consider: the present value of a cash flow.

(This is something of a derail, and the discussion would likely be better off in the Bankroll and Winrates thread.)

Not sure it's quite that simple. I feel I have an advantage over most of my opponents regardless of what depth I play at, and yet I feel the advantage of have over them when playing short is quite more significant than the advantage of have over them playing deep. So then the question becomes whether my massive advantage I have playing with small $ stacks outweighs the small advantage I have playing with large $$$ stacks (in terms of overall +EV). I've clearly come to my own conclusions regarding this, but it will be different for everyone. An honest evaluation of our deepstack skillz when compared to our opponents is paramount.

My guess is quite a lot of winners (obviously with the exception of real crushers) would be better off playing short. But obviously that's for everyone to figure out for themselves and whether it is applicable to them.

GcluelessstacksizingnoobG

If you are under-rolled, it’s probably better to move down in stakes rather than short-stack. If you are playing the lowest stake, which is 1/2 in most casinos. I think rake makes short stacking dubious.

If you have a job which provides you with discretionary income. You don’t need a bankroll. It’s fine to the casino with one buy-in, see if you run it up and try again next week if you lose.

I'm gonna use that that as one of those blurbs on the back of my autobiography.

OP, you don't have a bankroll. You have a budget. That's one reason I haven't moved this to the winrates thread.

If you are perpetually at 2 buyins, you either are a losing player or don't have the financial discipline to build a bankroll. If you are just starting out, you most likely fit into the losing player category. Most players fall into these categories. So I would take your question to be more of, "I have 2 full buyins. How do I make my money last the longest?"

We can break down the amount of the buyin into 4 levels:

Short Stacking: 30BB
Medium Stacking: 60BB
Full Stacking: 100BB
Deep Stacking: 200BB+

We'll ignore deep stacking since many rooms won't let you buy in that deep and you have limited funds.

A good short stackers are extremely rare. As pointed out above, there are some good strategy threads on the subject. While the decisions are clear cut, they require having a strong knowledge of ranges and people's tendencies. Variance is generally high because most of the decisions are made on the flop and involve trying to get 60/40 flips. Most newish players attracted to short stacking don't have the needed knowledge. Instead, they play pretty much like everyone else by limping in with a lot of hands hoping to hit a big hand, but don't have enough to behind them to get paid off when they hit. Variance is low with this strategy, but the bleeding is continual. They don't last long in the game.

I think most players with a medium stack use it as a crutch to make their TP hand decisions "easier." In a stronger game, they know people aren't going to play a lot of implied odds hands against them since they won't get paid off based on their stack. Therefore, they can b/b/b with TP hands and be reasonably sure they won't run into a hidden monster. The problem is that they can't really have a hidden monster either in such a game.

A good poster from years ago flipped the SPR ratio question on its head. He postulated that if the SPR is under 4 on the flop, you should be more inclined to put your stack in with TP, you shouldn't bet or call more than 4 times the pot with a TP hand. You create a budget for yourself. So if the pot is 7 BB on the flop, you don't want to put in more than 28 BB.

The advantage of this is that you can play more IO hands, but at the same time have a guard rail to prevent you from calling off 100 BB by the river with TPMK.

Therefore, I think a medium stack is fine if you are in the beginner stage, but it isn't where you want to remain as you improve.

I want to add that there is no shame in being a losing player. We all have to start somewhere. If you want to get better and become a winner, you are going to have to work at it, and some of that work has to happen at the tables, and you are going to lose money while you are doing that work.

As an aside, because of rake, the average player in the 1-1-2 game where I play loses $17/hour and the average 2-3-5 player loses $23/hour. Imagine a serious rec who plays ten hours per week, fifty weeks per year. The 1-1-2 player loses $8300/year and the 2-3-5 player loses $11,700/year.

That sounds like a lot of money, but compare it to greens fees and the cost of equipment for golf, and maybe travel too. Or lift tickets and equipment and travel for skiing. Or the enormous expenses of owning a boat. Viewed through that lens, poker is a reasonably costing rich person's hobby, that has the added advantage that if you care to get good at it you can turn it from an expense into a positive cash flow.

I say this to underscore the fact that many recreational players who happen to lose money are behaving in a reasonable and appropriate way, and they do not deserve our scorn or contempt. Those of us who are pros rely upon them, but we should never look down on them.

I forget who said it but it's along the lines of "poker pros prey on the fish at the poker table...but to a poker hobbyist living comfortably, poker pros are the fish of life outside of the poker room"

+1 to both of these

A doctor, lawyer, successful businessman could be a fish at the poker table but the fish might make $200K+ while some pros struggle to crack $50K. It's pretty cringy for the table hotshots to look down on the fish just because their preflop 3bet game isn't properly balanced or whatever.

If you are good at short stacking, you absolutely WILL significantly reduce your risk of ruin. You will be making smaller bets with a larger edge.

You will also reduce tilt and/or the impact it has.

There are, in my possibly wrong opinion, nuances to LLSNL shorty play that get overlooked by people who see it like online or a tourney. Mainly, it's OK to just take flops with so-so hands because there is minimal RIO for you and you can go with top pairs and not worry. So, let's say it goes r/c/c and you are in LP or the blinds with qt off or k9 off. IMO if you are quite short you can call and just try to make a pear much of the time.

You'll also have some decent bluffing chances postflop IP. If someone notices you're short, I find they will be reluctant to bet into you with a low equity bluff because they expect you to just stack off really light. For the same reason, they will rarely slow play. So, when they check, it's often a check/fold.

How is the edge larger? Rake is much more significant for short-stackers. Even rakeless I’d disagree, though.

Variance is less for short stackers and RoR should be lower rakeless, but I’m not sure that RoR is lower in a high rake environment.

I guess it's just my experience and my judgement of that experience. The rake does make it closer. But there are just tons of times I've gotten it in pre as a shorty vs a hand that probably would have folded to a 3b deeper.

I also just think it's fun to run 12bb to a full stack or whatever, so I rarely top off.

Anyway, let's say you have 25bb. V 6xs. You shove AQ. He looks frustrated and calls with AT or KQ. Seems to happen somewhat often in my experience. Obviously, your edge is huge in this spot.

The edge of the short-stack player comes from the fact that the other players don't have short stacks. The effective stack for a short-stacker is their own stack size. The other players have to worry about each other's larger stacks, and corresponding implied odds their own stack offers to others and reverse implied odds the other stacks impose on them.

When a small stack enters the pot and you are next to act, you have to be concerned not only about the range of the small stack, but also the as-yet uncapped ranges of the players who are yet to act. Thus, the small stack can make moves that the larger stacks can't.

This was described almost twenty-five years ago in Andy Latto's famous "magic glasses" post on short-stacking on the old rec.gambling Usenet newsgroup. (I wish I could find a link but it seems to be lost in the mists of Internet history. There used to be a website archiving the Best Of Rec.Gambling, but it too has passed.)

Didn't mean to imply that a rec player should be held in comtempt. I'm a rec player myself these days.

I started out short stacking. Confirmed that's it's boring and your win rate is less. You also can't play marginal hands and everything has to be played hard. It's really hard to bluff because everyone calls.

Excellent info, thanks.

Recpoker was really cool. I'm sad to hear that it's gone. There was some good drama there too, like Daniel N going off on "Stinky Feet" Annie Duke.

One more reason to short stack: you want to grind crazy hours for some reason.

I got into shortstacking when Binions had this crazy rake back promo and there would be days I would need to play for like 12 hours. I didn't ever want to be in a situation where I was down several hundred BBs an had to continue playing for 8 hours, or bail out of the promo. So I'd always buy in for $100 and try to build from there. That's really where I learned to do it.

I would do the same thing if I was in some sort of financial pinch and wanted to grind a fixed amount of money. Go for the bigger edge, lower hourly and putting in tons of hours, so that I could have the best chance of hitting my goal.

This has been discussed ITF at length, but I'll give it another shot..

Short-stacking does not reduce variance, at least not in the context we are used to discussing. By that I mean it doesn't reduce hand equity variance. In fact it increases variance quite substantially. Think about it like this..

If a player was playing a $150 stack at a no rake, no forced bet nlhe game (no blinds or antes) with a minimum bet of $50, he would be able to open for 3x the min bet one time, be all in, and be at the mercy of the deck. It doesn't matter if that player is Phil Ivey or Isaac Haxton and the rest of the table is made up of the 2/4 limit players you see at your casino at 10:15am on a Tuesday. The variance associated with playing such a short stack is going to be off the charts as you will always be at the mercy of the deck. I realize this is a completely unrealistic scenario but if we increase our stack to $500 we are able to relay slightly more on our skill edge. As our stack further increases, so does our ability to b/f, bluff, implement a 3b strat, ect... and this will allow us to exploit our skill edge over the field.

If playing a short-stack reduced variance, why are tournaments so high variance? Outside of the first few hours, tournament stacks usually sit between 20bb and 50bb

What shortstacking does cut down on is the size of our swings. If you look at the graph of a very good LAG, it would look like a mountain range, with lots of extreme peaks and valleys, but the amount won would be significantly higher than that of a short-stacker, who's graph would be more reminiscent of a stairway. Lots of little ups and downs, but from a distance it looks like a 45 deg angle.

Can you explain what hand equity variance means?

I clearly don’t think about these things similarly to how most people do. When I refer to variance in the context of gambling I’m almost always talking about the variance of our results in BB/antes/whatever base unit the game is using, which is lower for short stacking NLHE.

Tournament results have high variance because of their payout structure, not stacks. The WSOPME will have higher variance than your local 30 player donkament with blinds doubling every 10 minutes. I’m general games with infrequent, high payouts will have higher variance. Playing numbers on roulette for example is higher variance than playing red/black.

Before the thread goes off the rails, there are two types of variance discussed in poker. The first is the statistical definition.

In poker, variance is only negative results due to bad beats and luck. Positive results are known as "skill."

A short stacker is going to have to earn their equity by facing the rest of the board more often than someone with a 100 BB stack. The reason is that they will be "all in" where as a 100 BB stack can use leverage to get people who are behind to fold their equity. For example, if you have TT and the villain has AK suited, the villain is actually ahead if they can see the turn and river. A short stacker with the TT can't chase out the AKs. However, someone who has 100 BB has the leverage of a turn bet that makes calling unworthwhile.

Before Black Friday, there were several good (notorious?) short stackers that shared their graphs. Their winrates were about 1/2 of a top full stacked player. They made it up in being able to play a simpler game to multi-table more. From a statistical view, a smaller winrate with the same distribution of results meant their variance was higher.

From a poker view, they didn't lose as much when they lost, so their variance is lower.

This is great description, imo.

Because I'm mostly ~shortish stacking, my giraffe from space looks like the 45 degree angle.

The question the OP (and everyone else) has to ask themselves is whether (a) they can actually be a really good LAG (very few can) and (b) can they continue to play their A game when in the middle of their inevitable huge downswings (even fewer can).

Ggoodluck,imoG

Agreed. And conversely, can they continue to play disciplined short stack strategy when it gets long and boring. GG, and others above, state the downside of full stacking here to some extent. The downside of short stacking is it is a nit/agg game. You can't play speculative hands as profitably - read, can't play wide. Must tighten up, and remain tight even when downswinging - getting no hands to play. And must GII frequently when you do play.

So, which downside can your personality weather better?