Quote:
Originally Posted by Sol Reader
Right, and I would argue that it's linked with not buying into groupthink about things like how good players always have to buyin at least 100bbs or deep or cover the fish, regardless of the situation. It involves chipping away at your ego, or at least recognising why you do a thing, and how much of your arguments for it is actually logic or just rationalising.
As an example, my friend with a <100k roll sat at a very juicy and loose preflop 10/25/50/100 NL game where the minbuyin is 1k, and he gave himself a stoploss of 15k and decided to play 3 bullets of 5k instead of 15 bullets of 1k, or at least 6 bullets of 2.5k. That is an absurd decision for a long time pro and smart player to make.
Yeah your 5k bullets give you higher hourly than the 1k bullets, but the game runs for 5-8 hours, and he's very likely to go broke in the first 4 hours at 5k a buyin, and his hourly is clearly not that much higher than if he say at 1k, so his average winrate is much lower since a good chunk of the time he doesn't get to play and expose his edge for the full duration of the game.
As you likely know these higher stakes games have all kinds of on-and-off-table dynamics in play particularly when they (often) revolve around a single spot. Now, besides fading risk of ruin, I get that there can be other reasons for an uber-self-aware player not to cover the spot/buy in short. In a vacuum though, I do still see it as a disadvantage to only be able to take bites at the spot while your opponents can take it all in one hand (which in 4 blind games is often what happens). Of course, we don't live in a vacuum, and beyond your own reasons for 1-3k bullets, your 'short' stack actually might have a seriously negative impact on how the spot plays/plays back at you, especially if dealing with an action-whale who likely thrives/is playing the game to leverage his wealth and find pain points in his pro opponents. Even deeper than that, when the unicorn is in the game, (a game that was likely not a random event), it certainly is not going to be good for the health/life of the game itself when you sit down with 10 blacks, the whale notices, the pros notice, and you're now a borderline empty chair if you're not adding to the life of the party and just sitting there, waiting, jamming, reloading, waiting...