One of the most important pieces of information you can gain about the other players at your table is sitting right out there in the open for everyone to see. Each player has one or more stacks of chips in front of them and the relative size of their stack will have a big influence on how they play. In this respect cash games and tournaments are very different. Let’s look at chip stacks in cash games first.

If a player has many more chips than the “average” stack at a cash game table, they are probably having a good poker day. Watch the big stack play: is he just a very good player or is the deck hitting him over the head? Is she playing a lot of hands to build that big stack or is she playing more since she won those chips and is now giving them away? On the other side of the coin, the short stacks could be big losers but no matter how they got short, a small stack tends to be ready to get all of their remaining chips in quickly. If they intended to play much longer they would have bought in again and got back to something like an average stack.

In tournament play, it is much more critical that you be aware of stack size; most particularly in a no limit game. Every stack bigger than yours can bust you out of a no limit tournament. Every short stack is looking to “double up” and that will make them more aggressive with marginal hands. In a tournament it is also good to know how your chip stack measures up to an “average stack” in the entire tournament, which is why many tournament clocks have a place for the average stack to be displayed.

Chip stacks can tell you a lot about how other players are likely to play. The chips are right out there on the table, so pay attention to them. Size does matter.

-This is Beginner’s Poker Blog Post #23

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Poker Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.