You will be getting a lot of the money in preflop and on the flop in 60/40 70/30 type spots, instead of on the river when you have the hand locked up.

Lol, makes perfect sense. Thanks for the simple explanation.

What Koss said

Also you have more streets of information to gain a better read of your opponents range And where you are at in the hand.

It also makes it easier to fold in situations where you all but know you're beat but hey there's only $50 bucks left so lets put it in.

E.g.,

1/2 game $300 max buy in. You buy in for $200 and lose a few small pots so you have like $150. You hit top pair on a wet board and make a value bet. You get called. You have $50 left. Make another value bet and guy comes over the top and you know you're beat. But, hey, it's only $50, let's burn the money, pot odds right?

Had you bought in for $300, you'd have $150 left in that situation and you'd be more likely to fold.

Playing with deeper stacks make you play smarter. Also you win more etc.

As one can clearly see from DGi's chart, with at least 100bb you are enabled with enough chips to use a wide variety of poker tools, and when deep you can utilize them all. Short buys restrict you, which restricts your winrate IF you are capable of using all the poker tools.

Some players who are not adept at 100bb, "should" play short. (Until they acquire the skills to play deeper.

The goal though, would be to play with no boundaries on your strategy due to stack size constraints. Which is why a very good deepstack player will have the highest winrate/hour of any live player of similar skill at lower stack depths. Its the very reason that Doyle calls Deepstack the Cadillac of poker games.

100bbs always for me. Not the min but also not the max

I don't mind 70bb or so ($140 at 1/2) if you are trying to limit mistakes against unknowns. You can always add on to your double through, later - Bart and Limon talk about that in a PL podcast from a while back. It's free money in ramped-up games. Since the max at 1/2 is usually 300, you'd be better off buying in for 350 at 2/5 and topping up to 200bb after doubling through.

Sometimes you will get money in when you're behind too (in those spots). In fact you'll get the money in more often early in the hand when you're behind. And you won't win much in the bigger pots when you're way ahead on the later betting rounds.

I always buy in max, and top up max @ my local 1/1 and 1/2, short stacks tend to have a narrower range, so when they put 50%+ of their stack in the middle on the flop, you pretty much know where you are at.

Players with short stack also tend to limp a lot and they will have a hard time calling if you raise 8bb+ behind them and fold out a lot of marginal hands that could be beating your marginal hands.

Here's a thought, only buy-in with what you're comfortable losing. If you only want to risk $100 then you don't buy-in full. I used to play short stacked always, so whenever I lost my buy-in I only lost the minimum and it wasn't as hard in my opinion to win it all back again. Of course you want to have a huge stack when you get the nuts so you can put somebody else all-in.

If the rake is high then you should probably be buying in full if you can handle the loss.

Another really really good answer is "because anything worth doing, is worth doing right."

Exactly, always buy in for the max to get max payout when you have a monster !

Almost always buy-in full but sometimes shot taking I will buy in for 150BB at a 200BB table. Just helps reduce variance a tad, at the sacrifice of a little bit of win rate (assuming I have an edge...)
OP if you feel comfortable shortstaking your first buy-in go for it, it is undoubtably profitable if played correctly
Also what's up with all the bumped threads from a year ago?