Carl “The Dean” Sampson

 

Whenever you sit down in any game of poker then one of the things that you should immediately take a note of is the respective stack sizes of each player on your table. This can indicate an awful about not just a player’s goals and objectives but also their overall level of ability too.

 

Let us look at an example here to see what I mean. I will use a $2-$4 game on my sponsor’s website, Cake Poker to highlight what I am talking about here. The game is a six max game and obviously there are five other players on this table besides you. A $2-$4 game has a maximum buy in of $400 with the ability to reload should you dip below that figure.

 

The five players on your table have the following size chip stacks, $412, $168, $84, $923 and $617. So what can we deduce from these figures? Well without concrete proof then we really cannot be certain of anything but it is better to have something to go on when we first sit down than nothing at all.

 

Firstly the player who is sitting with a stack of $84 seems to be a novice player. No serious player would be present on a table like this with such a short stack. While it is true that some expert players prefer to buy in short and can play short stacks very well, they are definitely in the minority. This player has either bought in for more money and lost it or bought in short to begin with.

 

They will hardly be skating around on thin ice making raises left right and centre with only $84. These players tend to play tightly waiting for a good hand so you can definitely attack their blinds or try to put pressure on them in other ways. The same can definitely be said for the player with $168 as well.

 

But there is one key difference between the player with the $84 stack and the player with the $168 stack. Both have shown that they have no intention of topping their stack up but the $84 stack is so low that they could take a shot with a wide range of hands in some kamikaze attempt to go down in a blaze of glory.

 

For example, you are on the button and open raise with the Qh-10s to $14. The small blind folds and the $84 stack is sitting in the big blind. Sometimes they will take a stab at the pot with an overbet all in move in situations like these forcing you to fold as you don’t want to play such a large pot with the hand that you have.

 

 

Some tiny stacks do this and some don’t so once you have seen a player do this then you simply adjust your play for next time. But this is the difference between the $84 stack and the $168 one, the player with the larger stack is less likely to make a knee jerk play like this.

 

What can be said of the players with the larger stacks? Well at this early stage we can see that they are not sitting there with small stacks and while this does not guarantee that they are good players, they are either winning players or good players as they are in front.

 

Players with larger stacks will tend to be the players who will be making moves for the simply reason that their bets and raises will be with a much smaller percentage of their stack. This will allow them to open raise more and also to bluff raise and pressure bet as well in situations where the smaller stacks would have to get out of the way.

 

As I have said, the players with the $923 and $617 stacks are either good players or winning players. They may not necessarily be good player but they ARE winning players for this session or so it would seem unless they have made previous buy-ins that they have lost.

 

But winning players have one thing that losing players don’t have…confidence! This gives them the ability to open up their ranges and make plays that they otherwise wouldn’t have made when they first sat down to play. The remaining player with the $412 stack, you observed take a seat at this table just a couple of minutes prior to you and you saw them buy in for the $400 maximum.

 

While you don’t know a single thing about this player as yet, you at least know that this is a player that has the confidence to buy in for $400 which is information in itself. So you can see just by looking at the stacks of your opponents how some of them may be playing even though you had never encountered any of them before. So the bottom line is…keep a look out for those stack sizes and think about what they could possibly mean.

 

 

 

Carl “The Dean” Sampson is sponsored by Cake Poker and can be seen at cakepoker/thedean