I was playing some of the deep NLHE tables the other day when I got an email from verneer:

Why are you buying in deep when you first sit down?

This struck me as a little odd. When I'd sat down there was a fish (63/3 type player) with 150bbs and I wanted to cover him. So I just bought in deep and had done so at all the tables I was at. After all, if you think you've got an edge surely you want to have the other players covered? So I dashed off a reply to that effect and thought no more of it (since I was multi-tabling at the time I didn't give it much thought initially). Then I got this:

I don't think you should play deep though. It's much, much more difficult.

Now that made me think a bit. This from someone whose game I respect enourmously, and who has coached me in the past. Of course he knew the "cover the fish" argument, but was still advising to buy in for 100bb. I don't think it was a "face it buddy, you're just not good enough to play 200bb deep" comment (but who knows - my favourite coaching line ever was once we were going through some hand histories and we can across some atrocious piece of play and he said "I don't want you to take this the wrong way...but do you play when you're drunk?") but rather just pointing out that 200bb poker is a very different game. In fact, on reflection, 200bb poker is as different from 100bb poker as 100bb poker is from short-stacking 20bbs. I think the real advice is, by all means play deep stacked, but realise that it's a very different game.

A typical example: you open with KK and get called by a loose player. The flop comes low, you bet and he calls. Has he got a speculative suited connector which now has one pair or a draw? Did he hit a flop? Does he have JJ? Normally you can make a read and if you get it wrong it's "only" 100bbs. But deep do you really want to loose 200bbs on a one-pair hand? So you lead the turn and he raises. Now what? You know you're going to face a big river bet and maybe he's just trying to take the hand away when you "obviously" have just a pair?

The following two hands were against the same villain with just that circumstance. Here's the first:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069835

and here's the second:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069837

ok, so this villain is overly trickly and, in fact, you can read him as playing big hands slow and air fast. But the point is it's still a guessing game. If circumstances were different and he did have a real hand the first time around, he'd have stacked me; and if he whiffed on the second hand I'd have made around $1 from him. The big delta in results from that scenario wasn't some super read by me, just the luck of the cards. Hmmm - food for thought.

I did make some pretty poor plays too:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069829

when he wakes up on the turn what do I put him on? AJ, flush draw maybe? I guess it's not too unreasonable of me, but still it sucked.

An then a bit later, I managed to get a set all-in on the flop only having 32% equity. Still, his hand is fairly underrepped so "big pair plus a flush draw" must be a large part of his range, and I'm doing well against that.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069840

Finally, I'll leave you with one of those hands that to review later and think "was I drunk when I played that?"

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069848