Buy in short to protect your bankroll!

[HoldEmNewby]

Pokey is full of [censored] everyone knows we only play SSNL to help train ourselves to play in the WSOP ME. By forcing yourself to play with a small stack we are trained to deal with those preassure filled fluctuation points where our stack is dwindling away and we need to find a spot to get it in. What a hater he just can't bare to see people improving themselves!

On the real good post. In all honestly we are here to learn the game. Playing short stacked stunts our growth because we are never forced to play poker (its bad enough we spend our time at SSNL playing NLHE against players who think the game is "go fish"). You can't learn the game short stacked. You don't need reads (beyond pf stats) and you don't need to think if you know you never have to make a decision beyond the flop.

Players at SSNL have one objective: the come up. Build a bankroll and get beyond the basics to become a winning MSNL player. Playing short stacked is counter productive to both these goals: it limits your winnings (its more +EV to play full stacked against SSNL donkeys) and you will never learn the skills needed to be a winning MSNL player if you never have to think.

Play full stacked, turn $500 into $12,000 (bankroll for $400NL) playing SSNL and pick up the skills needed to move up along the way.

ps> I'm sure there are players who have been able to move up and improve playing short stacked. That said the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason.

[Vinetou]

Great post Pokey. I would never play shortstacked because I like getting paid off when I hit a monster.

On the other hand, I heard from people who play at full tilt that you can sometimes see Phil Ivey playing shortstacked. What do you think about that? Maybe he is drunk at the time or did he find some strategy to make it profitable?

[Matt Ruff]

[ QUOTE ]
On the real good post. In all honestly we are here to learn the game. Playing short stacked stunts our growth because we are never forced to play poker (its bad enough we spend our time at SSNL playing NLHE against players who think the game is "go fish"). You can't learn the game short stacked. You don't need reads (beyond pf stats) and you don't need to think if you know you never have to make a decision beyond the flop.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree are there are important things about NL you can only learn playing deepstacked. But it seems to me the lesson offered by this hand -- "Don't overvalue bottom two pair" -- isn't one of them. If anything, a thinking but novice player is more likely to learn that lesson cheaply while playing shortstacked.

If I'm short at this table, I'm folding 9Ts to Pokey's raise. Then I get to watch UTG go broke, and hopefully the 9 on the river doesn't stop me from doing the math and realizing how much trouble I would have been in on the flop and the turn.

If I'm deep enough to call the preflop raise, on the other hand, I end up in first position with a third-best hand that, to my novice eyes, probably looks pretty decent. And whether I manage to get away from it on the flop or go all-in, the 9 on the river is probably more likely to color my conclusions than if I were a bystander.

[AKQJ10]

Yawn. This has been talked to death, so I'm seriously cutting down the keystrokes I devote to it. Not cutting down enough though.

[ QUOTE ]

<font color="blue">Flaw #1: Short-stack strategy gives up your biggest poker advantage.</font>

As students of the game, we are better players than our opponents.

[/ QUOTE ]

Depends on "us", and depends on "our opponents". No one advocates a short stack in games involving inferior deep-stacked opponents except for the other legitimate reasons cited (e.g., bankroll).

You'll see some hands posted here with bad postflop decisions. (I'm hardly one to talk, but I'm referring to hands with what even I can see are obvious blunders.) I hope those players take the OP to heart, because their money builds my bankroll the same as non-2+2ers.

The pedagogical point is valid but each of us has to determine how to allocate our scarce resources between donking off our training budget and building bankroll. You can also learn a great deal from sitting behind a short stack, tossing cards in the muck and trying to put people on hands, and once you double through then you gradually start playing deeper stacks. It's not a binary thing -- "I'm going to never play a deep stack in my life and cash out once my stack gets to 40 BBL." You just learn gradually rather than throwing yourself in the deep end of the pool.

But hey, Esteemed Beginner, as long as you're willing to subsidize your own learning, play a deep stack and gain all the education you want. Again, I'd love to help you gain experience for the right price.

Pokey, you do a great deal of very valuable writing on this site. I've seen you deftly explain topics that haven't before been clearly summarized for beginners, and when you do so I'm greatly in your debt.

Rehashing a trite topic that's been driven into the ground, and doing so in dogmatic fashion, is frankly beneath you.

[AKQJ10]

Upon reflection, I should probably try harder to articulate why this view, though not without merit, is in my opinion a suboptimal approach to learning NLHE:

[ QUOTE ]
<font color="blue">Flaw #2: Short-stack strategy stunts your growth as a poker player.</font>

...In summary, playing short-stacked poker is a crutch that may make you some bucks in the immediate future but will cost you much in the long run. You play uNL poker to learn; don't subvert that learning process by eliminating the most challenging -- and most profitable! -- part of the poker game.

[/ QUOTE ]

First, to reiterate, no one's saying that beginners should aim to spend the next 20 years and 500 thousand hands playing short stacks. It is indeed a crutch, and wise people use a crutch to support themselves until they've built up the ability to walk on their own.

Now, I'm not a trained educator, so I have to fall back on comparisons with poker to other more established disciplines with a similarly large body of knowledge. So let's look at how you might choose to go about learning Spanish, or how you'd learn to play piano.

Perhaps your goal is to become an expert in the language of Cervantes and Neruda. You might decide that the way to appreciate its beauties is to dive right into Don Quijote or at least into a daily newspaper. So you'd get a nice thick dictionary and possibly hire a tutor to explain some grammatical nuances, and if you didn't give up out of frustration eventually you'd get pretty good at reading written Spanish. Likewise, you could dive right into conversations or watching TV, and slowly you'd improve your listening comprehension.

But that's not what you find in an introductory Spanish class. Instead you find a controlled vocabulary and grammar, maybe 500 words and the present tense in a college semester. Although no one would argue that 500 words will make you a near-native speaker, it's enough to give you some benefit. Then if you're motivated, you'll move on to more advanced courses. You could certainly take on the whole language from the start, but most human beings learn from taking a smaller body of knowledge, reinforcing it, and then building it out incrementally.

Likewise, if you want to learn piano, you could pick up a score for the Rach 3 and pluck it out, note by note. With practice you might get pretty good. But a trained piano teacher isn't going to teach you that way; instead you're going to learn the basics like scales (thanks NLHE:TAP!) and simple songs. You won't be the life of the party playing "My Clever Pup" or "Yankee Doodle Drum", but the idea is that reinforcing the fundamentals will put you in great position should you decide to move forward.

<font color="brown">So in other areas we accept that human beings don't thrive by attacking an entire body of knowledge from the beginning. But for some reason, in poker gradualism will "subvert [the] learning process" and "cost you much in the long run." This isn't some minority opinion held by Pokey; this is the established consensus of the 2+2 NLHE forums!</font>

Think about it: start with "Una Coca-Cola por favor, y uno, dos, tres cafés," and once you've experienced some success, you'll likely be motivated to press on to the Quijote.

[LearningCurve]

Philip, I was all sold on the idea of the full buy-in and now you go and make this nice articulate post to put me back on the fence! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Having never even played poker until a few months ago, I'm still assuredly rather clueless with it and have MUCH to learn. Although you may find yourself in the minority here on 2p2 playing short-stacked, your arguments for doing so certainly have a good deal of merit for some of us. Thanks for taking the time to share your viewpoint in a most eloquent fashion.

[Matt Ruff]

[ QUOTE ]
Pokey, you do a great deal of very valuable writing on this site. I've seen you deftly explain topics that haven't before been clearly summarized for beginners, and when you do so I'm greatly in your debt.

Rehashing a trite topic that's been driven into the ground, and doing so in dogmatic fashion, is frankly beneath you.

[/ QUOTE ]

In fairness to Pokey, this is a two-month-old thread; however, it's been added to the list of "essential uNL posts" stickied at the top of the Micro forum, which is where I ran across it while looking for advice on a completely different topic (and in that context, I think your two responses are more helpful than mine).

[AKQJ10]

[ QUOTE ]
Philip, I was all sold on the idea of the full buy-in and now you go and make this long-winded and boring display of logorrhea to put me back on the fence! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

FYP [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

But at risk of beating a dead horse, you don't have to choose one or the other. I think you should take occasional shots at deep-stack play. If you feel like you're making good decisions and are adequately bankrolled, keep going. If you have hands where you think you misplayed the later rounds, back off, post hands, analyze, ruminate, and grind a bit on shorter stacks until you feel solid again. That way you'll have the benefit of both kinds of feedback -- maybe you make a lot short stacked and marginally lose a little bit deep stacked -- and you can take pride in your progress while planning to address your deficiencies.

Matt,

Good catch, and I should have noticed that. This thread must have been from the "dead period" in the fall where I wasn't participating.

Pokey makes some good points and does so persuasively. But I don't see anywhere above, until your post, that someone calls any of his ideas into question. He's obviously a very gifted player and teacher, but we should be a little more skeptical and not take everything a good player says as though handed down on stone tablets from Sinai. Sure, as a newbie it's wise to trust those with experience. But we learn from discussing our points of disagreement.

Just as a loose end, here's one more critique of the OP: For every full house-versus-straight or quads-versus-full house or straight flush-versus-quads you can pull out where you wish you were deep stacked, you could just as easily be on the losing end and pay off deep stacked. That's relevant only inasmuch as a good player would get away from those losing hands. The FH-straight-two pair hand is interesting but only shows that bad players take two pair too far, which obviously will benefit good postflop players. I don't think you can assume that readers of this forum don't take two pair too far just because they read this forum, so the example is really irrelevant to the OP. If the river is the K [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] instead of 9 [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] then the T9 has limited how much he loses instead of how much he wins. How results oriented!

But regardless, I'm not saying anything new. This topic was already talked to death two months ago. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[Route66]

I can't figure out the point of your posts. You seem to be simulataneously saying that the thread wasn't worth starting in the first place because it's a tired subject, while at the same time offering an opposing view. Hence, it's a topic worthy of discussion. I realize its an older thread, and perhaps you wouldn't have been so harsh had you realized it, but calling a guy out for writing something that's "beneath" him is a bit out of line I think. Especially considering what a great service Pokey has provided to the members of this forum. If someone writes something that's of no interest to you, then feel free to pass on it. Many others may gain from his insights, even if we don't always agree with everything 100%. As far as I'm concerned, Pokey can write about anything he pleases. And if he posts the occassional stinker, then he gets a pass. I think he's earned it.

[HitNRunPoster]

If the fish buy for 60bb and the tags buy for 100, and I don't think I'm better than the tags, would you recommend buying for 60bb while i learn the game? [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]