How deep makes a difference?

[partygirluk]

i.e there are hands you would play differently with 50 BBs, than if you had 150, or different with 150 than 500, but when does it cease to make a difference? Assume a full ring of typical players, e.g. a couple of good players, a few OKs and a few bads.

[-Syk-]

There's a nice chapter on the influence deep stacks have in NL cash games in PL & NL Poker by Bob Ciaffone. I reccomend it.

[turnipmonster]

it always makes a difference to me. how deep everyone is influences how I play hands significantly on every street. for instance, if everyone has more than 500BB in their stack, you might want to raise hands like 77 behind a lot of limpers. reasons are buying position, initiative, deception and pot building. giving up a little money early (by pot building) can significantly compound the size of the pot later if you expect multiple callers on the flop.

--turnipmonster

[AZK]

I would say once everyone has 100 - 150x a standard opening raise, depth starts to not matter as much since everyone is SO deep, but this might just be due to the type of game I play in. I play in a 2/5 game with no max buy where a standard raise is 35 - 65 range, so once everyone has 3500+, difference in play doesn't matter if say someone has 3500 and someone has 6000, compared to if someone has 1200 and someone has 3500, make any sense?

[partygirluk]

You say it always makes a difference to you, but what is the most one could realistically lose or gain on one hand. To take an extremee example, the play with 1 million BBs would surely be identical to that with 5 million BBs.

[Loci]

I rate the importance of my stack to the people I'm playing with. If the table is filled with top of the line players, then I buy in low, if I'm one of the best, I buy in large to cover the fish. Tommy Angelo wrote a good article on this once.

[knifeandfork]

8" is better than 6" which is better than 4 "

[Rococo]

Partygirl,

Turnipmonster touches on the critical issue here in terms of play variance. How deep your opponents are is just as important as how deep you are. If most of the players (including you) are deep, you can raise mid pockets and connectors in late position on occasion for the reasons turnipmonster describes. But even if you have 1000BB, you don't have the implied odds to raise 68 suited in late position if all of your opponents have 40BB.

If everyone is deep, you also have to play large pockets more cautiously in early position (especially up front) because strong opponents will be playing more hands with implied odds in late position.

There was an excellent string a some time back titled "deep stack theory". Tommy Angelo and others weighed in with good advice.