Advice to beginners to always buy in as deep as possible is at best counterproductive and at worst malicious.
You don’t learn piano best by starting with the Rach 3, plunking it out note by note. You don’t learn Spanish best by picking up the Quijote and trying to understand every word.
You don’t learn no-limit poker best by starting out learning all different effective stack sizes, preflop play, flop play, turn play, and river play, all at once. Much better is to focus on learning simple cases well and branch out to more difficult cases.
In virtually every discipline you start out learning the basics and move on to more complex knowledge as you master the basics. Yet in poker, a million experts will swear that the only way to learn NLHE is by trying to learn everything at once.
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This topic’s been talked to death but hopefully I’ve learned to express my position succinctly. Ed Miller’s blog has a great deal more on both theory and praxis of playing shorter stacks in NLHE.
