[Margaud]

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The next factor is that if your treating your money and time spent at poker as an investment, than you'll be looking at your entire bankroll as your principle and trying to see how you grow it. Now the if you consider a poker player who has 1 million dollars, you want to grow it, well playing 25/50plo table and you win $5 000 so you now have $1 005 000 dollars. Congrats you just increased your bankroll by .5% so obv its kinda pointless so you step up to the 250/500plo tables and win $50 000, you just increase your bankroll by 5% now you feel like you have something in your pocket. However now your have 5% of your entire bankroll on the table and when you loose well it works a lot different from winning...you ever time you win 50k 250/500plo its not 5% anymore.
(going to use smaller amounts to make it easy)
100nl $2000br
win $100 = 2100br +4.7%
win $100 = 2200br +4.5%
win $100 = 2300br +4.3%

Now watch when you loose

loose $100 = 1900br -5.2%
loose $100 = 1800br -5.5%
loose $100 = 1700br -5.9%
loose $100 = 1600br -6.25%

So as can be seen the compounding works against you on the way up, you need to keep more money in play to keep the same size of returns, however, as you loose money you can't keep at the same level of play without threating larger and larger percentages of your bankroll each time you play.



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This is a very important point and one that exposes a flaw in the poker buy-in system.

As a former sports bettor, I'll explain one bankroll system that addresses the above problem. When making a sport wager, instead of betting on each game with a standard dollar amount, you bet a % of your entire bankroll. Say 1.5% for each game (other rules in the system control the amount of games you wager on and how much % of your total bankroll is at stake at any one time but that's not the point). By wagering a % of your bankroll, when you're winning, you win more and when you're losing you're losing less. It's all proportional.

With poker's typical 100bb buy-in, you cannot manage your roll the same way. The result is what warrant showed above.

Maybe using a % br system and playing 1 level up (not fully stacked) would allow for good br management.

Regarding the OP's question. I think the problem is that at low/mid stakes, there is still a wide range of skill level which is more profitable. The poker economy is a pyramid where all the cash goes to the top. The field of players at the high stakes level is much smaller and the difference in skill is not as wide. That means it's more of a gamble as your edges are smaller than it was at the lower games. More gamble + higher stakes is a recipe for bust.