Short Stacking vs Full Buy-Ins

[redbeard]

Just wanted to say this is a great idea for a forum. It is nice to see some of the old names who's ideas and thoughts I trust. It is hard to know who to trust and who is full of it without seeing many posts over a long period of time. I had a pretty good idea in the limit forums after nearly three years over there. Anyway, on to my reason for posting this:

I moved over to NL in July and of course immediately got the Professional No Limit Hold'em book by Flynn, Mehta, and Miller. They had some very unique concepts that I hadn't heard discussed in my other forms of training for NL. Basically, the authors advocate short stacking to help make top pair type hands easier to play post flop. I've instituted the change to short stacking and had slightly better results. This may be due to a natural learning curve and could have occured by staying at full stack buy-ins too for all I know. One thing for sure though is that short stacking reduces variance. I imagine it also reduces your win rate some as well. What I would like to get comments on is what everyone here thinks of the idea of short stacking. Is the reduced variance worth the reduced earnings? Would it allow me to move up to the next level at a lower bankroll requirement? I realize it might be difficult to speculate on that without exact numbers as to my win rate, but I also don't think my sample size is quite relavant just yet. In two months I've played close to 75K hands -- at limit this wouldn't be a large enough sample size to discuss so I'll exclude it here, hoping for a more generic discussion of short stacking vs the traditional full buy-in.

Here is a link to the discussion of the ideas in the book and many responses from the authors themselves. My post in that thread is on 7/27/2007 at 3:13am. Matt Flynn replied to my question that same day at 12:49pm.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...rt=all&vc=1

Let me know what you guys think.