The Official NLHE Theory and Practice thread.

[mbiz]

'Adjusting correctly to stack sizes' segment, page 13-14
I know skanksy goes into it properly later - but is he referring to implied odds as the reason to adjust to changing stack sizes?

[Carroters]

'Adjusting correctly to stack sizes' segment, page 13-14
I know skanksy goes into it properly later - but is he referring to implied odds as the reason to adjust to changing stack sizes?

There's a ton of reason to adjust differently based on the stack sizes of yourself and your opponents. Implied odds is certainly a good one. We obviously don't want to mine 33 vs a 25bb stack who opens to 4x, even if we know his range is [AA KK QQ AK] b/c obviously we just don't get anywhere near the implied odds we need to set mine, since we don't flop a set enough to justify only winning 21bb when we do but lose 4 the rest of the time.

Other reasons to adjust could simply be a result of the alterations a deep or shallow stack has on your oppoenent's range. Say a 20/18 opens OTB and we're 500bbs deep with him holding AKs in the bb. This is obviously an easy 3-bet/felt preflop vs most villains 100bb deep. After we 3 bet and he 4 bets though, it might not be so great to want to 5-bet with the intention of getting it in since villains range for stacking off 500bbs deep preflop is probably consdierably tighter than normal and may well just be [KK,AA] or something. Similarly, deep in post flop spot we need to adjust in order to protect our deep stack vs a stronger range for felting. Consequently, this works both ways and we can piut more pressure on our oppoenents, being able to threaten a 200bb stack for instacne in a 3 bet pot while only risking a fraction of that ourselves.

Say we 3-bet our AK 500bb deep to 11bb and the aggro BU villain flats. He folds to 3-bets 70% of the time. On an KJ9tt flop, we c-bet 14bb into 22bb and he's raises to 65bb. Now, if we call here, we're looking at a turn barrel of around 100bb and a river shove of 300ish. So with his flop raise, where we'd consdier doing nothing but staking off vs the draws worse Ks etc he can have 100bb deep, we're now in a situation where villain has threatened a lot of our chips and we don't think we're +EV vs his range for felting 500bb. if we're unsure of his frequencies and he's an aggro decent post flop player, we might decide to check the flop to protect our hand anbd keep the pot small oop where out massive stack is in danger, particularly if he isn't stationy and wont call 3 streets of value somewhat lightly. So our post-flop play totally changes in certain deep situations too.

Similarly we might want to avoid 3-betting hands like 99 for value preflop in this spot, since a 4 bet threatens a ton of our chips and we can't just stack off preflop.

So when we're deep we're looking to avoid reverse implied odds situations like playing AQo oop where we can flop dominated hands etc. We might want to fold these types of hands to our opponents 3-bet and continue more with stuff like 98s A2s 55 etc that have the potential to stack a big hand for 500bbs and also wont get us into too many bad reverse implied odds situations where we're the one's either beating a bluff or crushed facing action postflop.

So yeah stack sizes affect a ton of stuff: implieds odds being a big part of it. Hand/range selection for certain spots can change and postflop play can also change, making us less likely to build big pots oop with way ahead/way behind hands in deep pots and more likely to want to pot control and protect our stack in these situations instead.

As a general rule, the deeper you are, the tighter your range for felting in any given spot should be as your opponents range will be tighter and therefore have more equity vs you.

When Sklansky says

"when your opponent has $300 behind you do one thing and $5000 behind you do another."

It's easy to see how these concepts tie in here. If we have AJo in a 10/20NL game and the BU with $300 opens to 60, AJo is a trivial shove a lot of the time. When he has $5000 we might be very weary about inflating the pot oop with a potentially dominated hand in a 3 bet pot and chose to just flat instead, in order to keep worse hands in our opponent's range which we perhaps dominate (A9o for example) which he'll felt with the $300 stack and never ever with the $5000 stack.

Bit of a rant, but yeah everything changes with stack sizes not just implied odds. A lot of how to adjust is just common sense imo.