Buying Short
I’m always kind of amazed, when sitting down at an poker online table that has a minimum buy in, by the seemingly countless number of online poker players who love to buy the shortest stack they can and push it over and over again. My most frequent stakes for cash games now is $.50/$1 no limit, where players are allowed to buy in anywhere from $20 to $100. Going through the lists of poker tables, many show 3-4 players apiece where folks have seated themselves with that twenty, an amount that they will often hold onto until they get one ‘good’ hand, and then push. If the hand doesn’t hold up, they reload with the same twenty and start at the beginning.
The process is beguiling: if you are playing tight, careful poker online , don’t you want to have more money sitting in front of you when you make the hand? Buying short seems not only antithetical to the solid poker player’s success, but also must be just severely frustrating: you never win that much, and more often than not, you can never bluff or get people to lay down: you simply have to have the goods. In general, I try to avoid sitting down at these tables where the short stacks linger. It’s frustrating to not be able to play good, solid poker against my opponents. I don’t play poker for cherry picking, I play it for the game.
