Stars 25-50 Shortstackers

[Prevaricator]

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I'm not a NL player, except at baby stakes, but I tend to agree with the shortstackers here. The guys complaining have won a lot of money playing poker, and are arguably some of the best in the world at online HS NL. You have an edge that you use to take money from other people. Now there are a few people that have found a way to negate your edge, and you call it unethical! Poker is not about ethics. It is a highly competitive game where the sole purpose is to take your opponents money. If it isn't against the rules, it ain't cheating, and it is totally ethical.

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siting in 3 handed games and only playing the button isnt against the rules either, care to defend that one?

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This isn't a matter of ethics, it's just an exploit that the site needs to fix.

Most sites, you can't do this because you have to post a big blind before being dealt a hand.

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all sites you can do it, when a new game is starting with 3 players one person has to get the button.

[bkholdem]

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r u telling me if i double up and then leave, as in take all my money off the table and give up my seat...and go get lunch...i cant put my name back on the wait list and buy in for the min again? lol of course i can

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u arent supposed to be able to, and you also cant take chips off the table while you're at the table.

the worse the shortstack condition gets the more likely stars will be to respond, by all means, spread the word.

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I have never, ever seen anyone take chips off the table online while they are at the table.

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are you dense? you sound like a huge idiot right now.

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maybe your dense.

live games players 'rathole' if they take money off the table while still in the game. if they leave the game and take their money with them and then return after getting back on the wait list it is not 'ratholing'.

online it is impossible to 'rathole'.

[FatalError]

bk, i shortstack a lot and even i think you're really an idiot when it comes to this topic, please stop posting in this thread

[TheNewf]

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If your rolled for 5/10 then your rolled to shortstack 25/50 no limit.


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lol, no.

[NOSUP4U]

I don't shortstack, and like the shortstackers at the 3/6NL level because they suck and are easy to exploit. But I just wanted to chime in on this thread and say that I think Daut presents his arguments well, and bkholdem has absolutely no understanding of how to put together a logical argument, or even to come off sounding like anything better than a stubborn jackass.

M

[AceCR9]

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ima aspiring 25 50 nl ratholer iz that so wrong????

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you can shortstack at 25/50 NL with a 5/10 roll.


lol at ppl posting against shortstacking

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this is just wrong and proves how dumb you are.

[LucidDream]

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maybe your dense.

live games players 'rathole' if they take money off the table while still in the game. if they leave the game and take their money with them and then return after getting back on the wait list it is not 'ratholing'.

online it is impossible to 'rathole'.

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actually, taking money off the table while still playing(live play) is called going south. winning money, then leaving so you can come back and rebuy short again is called ratholing. are you dense?

going south is 100% against the rules as NL games are played for table stakes.

ratholing is just an unethical thing done by pussies that are scared to play real poker.

[Nitilism]

bkholdem and his douchebag posse - you suck.

[fish2plus2]

Petitioning for no shortstacks is never going to work. stars doesnt allow ratholing, so be happy about that.

you are much better off petitioning for stars to open some tables that do not all short buy-ins.

also, people seem to make the mistake of changing tables too often which allows short stacks to move around. stay at the same tables and youll be better off.

[SixBillionMarks]

Hello 2+2

Finally this subject is being put under the microscope. This has been long overdue to say the least.

I am against shortstacking.

Ethics

“Ethics is not definable, is not implementable, because it is not conscious; it involves not only our thinking, but also our feeling.” --Valdemar W. Setzer

Our feeling.

Ethics are totally arbitrary. They are a collection of vague man-made guidelines that have no hard scientific foundation, and they can't be sorted through with logic. Therefor, our ethics won't make any sense to some of you, just like your lack of ethics doesn't make any sense to some of us. Continuing on with debate on the subject of poker ethics is totally pointless. It's just a feeling, just like any emotion really, that some of us have when we see others do what we consider to be unethical, or during those rare moments when we've done something unethical ourselves.

“I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” --Ernest Hemingway

Pragmatics

I want to explain my thoughts on this very thoroughly because from reading through this thread I feel like there are a lot of people here that don't understand a shortstacker's impact on a game of poker.

To explain, I'll use a very basic hypothetical game.

Let's say there's a table of 8 players, each sitting with full 100bb stacks. Everyone's got plenty of "ammunition" so the correct approach is to raise more, because there will be plenty of room in your chip stacks to force folds on each other regardless of what cards you're holding. So in this situation, let's say the full stacks could optimally raise the best 12% of all their preflop holdings on average throughout the game.

Now you enter the game, and sit down as the 9th player with only 20bbs in front of you. You only have 20bbs, so your decisions are pretty much all going to be made before the flop, and generally your only two options are to go all-in or fold, very very simple and easy.

Everybody else at the table has a full stack, and each of them individually is against a field of players that are predominantly full stacked, so it would be a mistake for any of them to adjust their game very much just because you sat down shortstacked. If they tighten up, they'll have a better game against you, but they'll have a worse game against 7 other people, and that would just be a bad idea. So they CAN'T tighten up.

Meanwhile, you're folding almost all of your hands and trying to get all your money in whenever you have a premium hand, and because all those fullstacks have to play against each other for the most part (raising 12%), you're getting tons of great opportunities to get all-in preflop with better hole cards, far more opportunities than you would be getting at a table with other shortstacks.

You have a big advantage here, and the only way for the other players to stop you from having a big advantage is for them to leave the table and break the game up completely.

It's an unfair advantage for you to have, and it's an unfair situation for the full stacks to be put into.

Especially at the high stakes tables, situations come up every single day where there's one shortstacker at the table that none of the others want in the game, but there's nothing they can do. The shortstacker won't leave. They can't leave and sit somewhere else, the shortstacker will just follow them.

Now imagine a game where a third of the table are skilled shortstackers and the rest are full stacks. The shortstackers are a significant presence in the game, so now the fullstacks would be wise to tighten up significantly before the flop. The shortstackers still have the advantage, and the fullstacks are forced to water their abilities down.

Shortstackers are a cloud hovering over the table. The more shortstackers there are, the tighter you have to play, and the fewer opportunities you'll have for your earned knowledge to shine. They take poker, which can be infinitely complex, impossible to master... and they turn it into their own little game of tic tac toe. And we're all forced to play.

Love of The Game

Try to forget your wallets when you consider this part of my argument. I understand that some of you are incapable of turning a profit without playing shortstacked poker, but try to forget about that for now. Forget about the money, and just try to remember that you are a competitor and that this is a game that you love and respect.

When everybody sits with a large stack, the final destination in your journey to become the perfect poker player, is death. No human can play perfect fullstacked no limit poker. In fact, no human can come even close. Not because of chance, not because of the randomness of how the cards are dealt. Simply on the merits of how incredibly complex and humanly infinite this game is, nobody can perfect it.

There will always be players whose hands we haven't researched enough or at all, with tendencies that we could've anticipated but did not. There will always be some clue that we didn't consider that would've proven the opponent's range of possible hole cards to be just a hair loose enough to make that all-in call with top pair for an extra 7bb of expected value, but we folded instead. There will always be vast room for improvement in your game, in anyone's game, and it's a lifelong struggle.

Like approaching zero, or like a bird flying toward the sunset; one can always move in the direction of perfect poker play, but one will die before they get there.

The same things just can't be said of shortstacked poker. When you have a short stack, the game is generally very, very simple: commit all your chips on these two hold cards, or fold them. There are probably half a dozen species of animal that could be trained to play near-perfect shortstacked poker. It really is a disgrace to poker for any skilled player to sit down with a 20bb stack, and personally, it makes me want to gag.

Raising the minimum buy-in from 20bb to 40bb would finally put an end to all of this nonsense, and my life would be a tiny bit better for it. But the only consideration the room managers will give to this is whether more hands will be played with current policy, or 40bb policy, and I really doubt there will be a large enough discrepancy to get what we want here.

I do like the idea of formatting something for everybody to send in to the support inboxes, though, and I liked where you were going with it Daut. They say there's no reason for everyone to send it in, but I disagree. I think we really need to pound this [censored] home, and not stop sending e-mails until they change their policy.

Like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption.

Fight the power everyone. Lovely forum you have here btw