I have encountered tons of poker players in my career and most often the newbies always have some queries regarding the effective stack. So through this post, I will cover and explain your effective stack with examples in detail.

Scenario

Suppose Issen is a ligapoker player and asks the following If the effective stack sizes of my online tables are 20 big blinds which are full of whales and passive fish. Am I justified in buying 50 to 70 big blinds instead of the normal effective stack size of 100 big blinds”?

So from this question, it is confirmed that there is a little bit of confusion on what the term effective stack sizes actually mean.

What is an effective stack size?

Now let’s start by defining effective stack size. The effective stack is the smallest of the stacks involved in a particular hand. So if you take a  situation where we’re on the flop, the effective stack against the cutoff would be their stack size.

So if you’re playing in a game and the effective stack is 20 big blinds and you buy-in for a million big blinds your million bitcoins don’t really matter all that much since you’re playing 20 big blind effective pokers against your opponents.

Buying shorter stack size Vs Buying a Larger stack size

While trying to answer this kind of question I like to think about the pros and the cons of buying in for a shorter stack size versus buying in for a larger stock size in this game.

I’m not really finding a tremendous amount of pros for buying in at the smaller say 20 big blind effective stacks or even buying in for 50 to 70 big ones.

Now 50 to 70 I think is better than buying it for 20 in this particular game since when you buy in for 20 if anyone does happen to get deep and it sounds like you’re playing in a pretty darn soft game. I’d hate to not be able to very quickly buy an effective stack size that matches say a fish that doubles up and now has 40 big blinds and I’m still sitting there with 20. I’m missing an opportunity in order to get their stack later down the line.

So buying for 20 doesn’t really seem to make much sense.  Buying in for 50 to 70 can make a little bit more sense but still, I probably want to buy in for a hundred since if a fish were to say double up and then double up again or continue growing a stack, I’m already there ready to match them and play a deeper game against them where hopefully my edge is going to be much much larger than theirs.

If you are assigning these players as fishy

players in the first place chances are you have a massive edge so why limit that with a shorter stack size when you can have a larger stack size. But they do happen to get deep and you can take massive advantage of that without having to rebuy on the fly.

Wrap Up

Now I’m just going to leave this as a short blog as it’s a very simple question. Hopefully, this helps you wrap your head around what effective stack sizes are.