If you’ve ever played in a live no limit hold’em cash game or indeed watched any of the televised cash games, chances are you’ve heard this or a similar question. But what does it mean?
If someone wants to know how deep your stack is they are basically asking how much more money you have that you can put into play on that hand. A common way of measuring how deep someone’s stack is by how many times the big blind they have; for example someone with $200.00 in a $5/$10 game has a stack 20 big blinds deep.
Generally speaking once stack sizes start to get beyond 100 big blinds you are starting to get into deep stack poker but stack sizes can and often do go far beyond this. In the early days of the online poker boom, you would see sites only offering tables with a maximum buy-in of 50 or 100 times the big blind. However, a number of sites now offer tables with buy-ins up to 250 times the big blind, immediately putting you into a deep stacked situation.
Implied odds and their relationship to stack size – Most players will make at least a short calculation of their pot odds when faced with a bet but far less will consider or understand their ‘implied odds’. Where pot odds only take into account what is already in the pot, implied odds also factor in the money you could win if you hit your hand. There is always an element of estimation and personal judgement when assessing implied odds because you don’t know for sure how much, if anything, you will get from opponent beforehand.
When assessing if you have the implied odds to call, stack size is absolutely key. If you or your opponent are going to be all in after the current street, you do not have any implied odds as you cannot get any more money even if you hit your hand. However, if you and your opponent both have large stacks (relative to the blinds) you can frequently call bets where you do not appear to have the immediate pot odds, because you hope to get future bets if you hit your hand.’
Elsewhere, why not check out Free Scratch Cards as the week goes on, who knows, you could win some money to play poker with!
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