No Limit Hold'em Sizing Your Buy-In
One favorite topic of discussion amongst no limit Hold’em player is what, exactly, is the optimal buy in amount when one first sits down in a game. Some players insist that one should make a big buy-in, since a big stack gives you the best chance of staging successful bluffs. It also gives you the potential for maximum profit if you catch a big hand. Other players believe that a small buy-in is best (see our earlier article on the ‘hit and go’ strategy for a discussion on why this may be the case).
It’s my personal feeling that the optimal buy-in amount is largely dependant on the caliber of one’s opponents. The worse the opposition, the bigger your buy in should be. By the same token, if you end up at a table with eight dynamite players there’s no shame in buying in small. When you first sit down, however, you have a problem; you don’t know how well your opponents play. And since you can always add to your stack by making an additional buy-in, but are not allowed to take money off the table once you’ve put it in play, the optimal strategy, I think, is to buy in for a relatively small amount and then reassess once you’ve got a feel for how your opponents play.
Example: I recently sat down in a $2-$5 no limit game at the Greektown casino in Detroit, Michigan. This game tends to play pretty loose, but occasionally I find it plays quite tight. Unless I know some of the players at the table—and on this night I did not—I usually don’t have a feel for how it’s going to play until I sit down. Since I hadn’t clocked the game beforehand I made a moderate initial buy in of 50 big bets and waited to see what would happen.
It didn’t take long. After 20 minutes I had seen one guy push $400 into an $80 pot with pocket jacks on a 763 flop, and get called by someone holding the 6d 5d, and another hand where a player had pushed $325 into a $60 pot with AK on a KT6 board and got called by the Ks 9c. Once I saw these two plays I quietly reached into my pocket and slipped another $600 under my stack. Clearly this was a game where it was going to really pay to have some chips in front of me.
There is one exception to this, and that occurs in games that have already spiraled completely out of control. If, when you sit down, you see lots of big stacks and lots of huge pots then your best play, in my opinion, is to make a conservative buy in; something around 50 times the big blind. Even though a big stack would be immediately profitable in a game like this I’ve found that you can frequently double or triple up in very short order because nobody at the table is ‘taking your stack seriously’. In other words, this may be your one chance to enjoy some of the advantages that come with playing a smaller stack, so you might as well take that opportunity while it’s available. When you’re in a position where your opponent will mindlessly call whatever bet you make—and that’s the position you’re going to be in if your stack is quite a bit smaller than the average stack—you’ve hit the Hold’em jackpot. Just relax, wait for a hand, and then get the money in the middle. Provided that lady luck doesn’t give you the cold shoulder you should have plenty of opportunities to play ‘big stack’ poker in fairly short order.
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