Buying in deep against a short-stacked fish - A cautionary tale

Live Poker / Marcus Bateman / 14 April 2010 / Leave a Comment

Playing deep stacked poker is much harder than shallow stack poker, so in this situation I ended up making my life hard against the good players, with no extra benefit from the fish.

Poker is not just a game about how you play each hand. There are many other important considerations to think about when you view a table, and one of the most important is how much you buy in for.

I remember playing a short handed game when I first started playing in live games seriously where a known fish was sitting and losing heavily. Every time he went bust he would simply rebuy for fifty big blinds and carry on losing. The remaining three players all had quite big stacks as a result of this, and without thinking I sat down in the game with the maximum two hundred buy ins allowed.

This was a big mistake. Although the fish carried on donating to the table, I kept finding myself in very difficult deep stacked hands against the skilled live players, who were obviously getting much more information from me than I could gather from them (still being new to live poker I'm sure I had some pretty obvious live tells), which all made my life much harder than it should have been. I ended up losing my profit from the fish plus interest in a few large pots, and left the building cursing my luck that night.

A few months later, while reading Barry Greenstein's excellent book Ace on The River, I realised I had made a pretty big error sitting so deep in this situation. Although it would have been fine had the fish been sitting with two hundred big blinds, with the table mark only playing fifty big blinds there is no reason for me to not sit with anything other than fifty big blinds.

Playing deep stacked poker is much harder than shallow stack poker, so in this situation I ended up making my life hard against the good players, with no extra benefit from the fish. Had I bought in for fifty big blinds, I would have made my life easier against the good players, and been just the same against the fish - clearly a vastly better result.

In situations such as this you only need to have enough chips to be able to win all of the weak players stack - anything above that simply exposes you to greater risk against players at least equal (and often much better) than you. It is important to think carefully about the table dynamic before you choose your buy in amount - it may be that you are over exposing yourself to risk without even noticing it.

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