Disclaimer: This is discussing people who are not capable of beating $2/4 at a typical online no-limit hold'em game when buying in for 100bb and who aspire one day to make a lot of money from poker.

The people who take what seems to be the most consistent abuse from fellow online poker-players are the people who buy in for 20-60bb in no-limit hold'em cash games. There are a wide variety of insults that have been thrown their way, but short-stacking does have certain promise for the player who chooses to buy-in short. You can read about the types of advantages and whatnot players can get in various threads that have been started here, but I'd like to discuss a few somethings that I'm fairly certain haven't been addressed (here at least) concerning short-stacking.

First, I'd like to point out that you can't move up as far in online poker if you're exclusively short-stacking as you can if you play with a near-full buy-in. Short-stackers need a large number of tables at their stake so they can rathole and jump over to a new table, and at higher stakes this is much harder to do since there aren't nearly as many tables running.

Also, many poker sites are taking active steps to keep short-stackers out of the games, especially at high stakes, like the introduction of 50BB minimum buy-in tables at PokerStars; we can only expect these measures to expand in the future to make it harder and harder for short-stackers to infiltrate games that other players don't want them in.

Second, no-limit hold'em with a relatively large buy-in is where the money is these days in online poker. If you don't cultivate the skills needed to play the game this way (late street play, etc.) then you're going to be way behind as the average player improves his game and you do not. The games are harder now than they were a few years ago, and while part of that is due to the US legislation and whatnot, the games were getting harder before that.

Let all hell breaking loose commence.