K, I took Deme's advice and now mix up my shortstacking and deepstacking. I usually play 30-50 hands short and get an idea about the table and the players then usually top up to the max buy-in and play deep. So far it is working good.

Now that you have some reads you can play the players. One of the most common mistakes I have noticed is players min-reraising when they have AA or KK, deeped stacked this is awful since you get no implied odds on a safe flop and the better opponents will pick up on it.

Example:

This afternoon playing .5/1 NL on Betfred, 10 player game

Hero is on the CO andhad 300$ in chips (doubled up off a few idiots already )
The button had about 80$
The BB had 65$

Hero is dealt

Folded to hero who decides to raise to 4$ total, button calls, BB raises to 7$ total (min raise), hero and button call.

Flop (21.50$ pot)



BB bets out 20$, Hero raises it to 60 total, button folds, BB calls and goes all in.

Turn and river were blanks

BB berates the hero for being a fish, hero explains he is new to poker and explains how he has a hard time folding suited cards.

Anyway I was just pointing out how stupid min-reraises are with big hands, I got lucky hitting the flop but I had major implied outs for hitting my flush, straight, trips or 2-pair. If you are going to raise-RAISE.

standard stacking there, good advice, nh

yeah perhaps ill use the min raise to bleed somones stack into the pot on the turn or so with the absolute nuts, but never with a vunerable hands like 2 pair or AA pf

the only time i will use a min raise is if its heads up or 3 way in a PF raised pot and i just flopped a set on the PF raiser, who has bet the ps into me.

How can you not love the players that can't wait to get stacked with monster pairs.

Min-raising pre-flop must be on of the worst moves in cash games, especially out of position.