Deep stacked poker

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 11 January 2011 / Leave a Comment

Deep stacked poker is a vastly more complex game than shorter stack poker - both in terms of card play and bankroll management - and drastically increases any edge that you have (or don't have) over your opponents.

This is a term that is frequently used in poker analysis, but is surprisingly ill defined, and understanding what typically constitutes deep stacked poker and the effect it has on games is crucial to understanding what games to sit down in and why.

Deep stacked poker is usually defined by the poker community as any form of big bet poker where you and the relevant players in the hand are playing upwards of one hundred and fifty big blinds deep - although in tournament play the term 'deep' can often refer to as little as forty big blinds due to the much smaller nature of typical stacks.

Deep stacked poker is a vastly more complex game than shorter stack poker - both in terms of card play and bankroll management - and drastically increases any edge that you have (or don't have) over your opponents. This comes down to the fundamental reason that deep stacked poker allows more options and more complexity in any given hand, and the more choices and decisions that a player is faced with, the more skill shows in poker.

Take a hand like pocket queens in two polar opposite situations - a short stacked game and a deep stacked game. In the short stack game, a player can simply raise pre flop, see any kind of vaguely safe flop, and shove the last of their stack in at around a pot size bet and take their chances - players can't set mine or play weaker speculative hands profitably against you because you have very little money left to make them going in behind worth it, and generally this sort of play is largely simple to play and unexploitable over the long run.

However, in a deep stacked game with the same hand, it is incredibly hard for that player to get even close to all of their stack in before the river without opening up huge leaks in their game, and all manner of options and hardships can await them as the hand progresses. Skilled players can pull all types of moves on you and play all types of hands pre flop, putting you in numerous uncomfortable situations as the hand and the board play out that can cost you huge sums of money in relation to the blinds if you slip up. The skill involved in playing basically all deep stacked spots is exponentially greater than when just playing a short stack.

Because of the huge leverage of skill that deep stacked poker produces (in that it hugely increases the edges between players), it is something that should be approached with quite a simple philosophy - play as deep as possible vs fish and as shallow as possible against good players. Ignoring this advice can easily eave you in horrendous spots where the slightest mistake can be hugely expensive, but following it well can often leave you in some of the most lucrative games in poker.

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