Buying in full versus buying in short

ne of the most common questions asked by players new to the game is whether or not they should buy into a cash game for the maximum allowed or if they should buy in for a lesser amount. As with most questions relating to poker, the answer is that it depends.

Personally, I am an advocate of buying in full, simply because it gives you the greatest chance of maximising your profits. Almost all online poker rooms have both lower limit and higher limits which you can buy in for and most now offer a variety of normal, shallow and deep stacked games to choose from. For the purpose of this article you should assume we are talking about the normal buy in games that a player usually buys in for between 35 and 100 big blinds.

As mentioned previously, the main reason for buying in for the maximum allowed is to maximise your potential profits when you have a big hand. Whilst not having a full stack hardly matters whilst you fold trash hands, it should be quite obvious that you would prefer as much money as possible to play with when you are dealt pocket aces or when you flop a set.

You should be aware that weak players tend to play horribly when deep stacked so you should be looking to at leave cover these players if you come across them on your poker site. These weak players give you great implied odds and basically the deeper you are against them the better as their mistakes will be more costly to them and profitable to you.

The only time you should really ever consider buying for less than the maximum allowed is when you are out of position against a player much stronger than yourself or are taking a shot at higher stakes for the first time, and even then you should be looking to get out of the first scenario as quickly as possible for quite obvious reasons!

Finally, whilst online poker room review sites will argue amongst themselves to which is amongst the best poker rooms you should always choose one that has the auto top-up feature in its software. This great feature automatically tops your stack back up to the maximum each time it drops below a set amount, thus keeping you full stacked at all times, it can be a very valuable tool indeed!