Study/Moving Up/Bankroll questions (long).

[EGO]

I've got a couple questions about moving up in relation to bankroll, and also would also like some thoughts on my new method of study.

Some history, first. I've been playing online poker for about two and a half years now. I've managed to move up from .25/.50 to $2/$4 in this period of time, spending around $400 from my bankroll every month, but less lately since there isn't much in the way of bonuses. Sadly, 90% of my income last year was from bonuses. I'm looking to improve that, while still moving up. I still have a minimum of $300 in bills. My wife works, and I'm a stay-at-home Dad, but she believes in me and I'm giving it another year to get to get to a more respectable income level.

I suck at multi-tabling. I can play two, but any more than that, and I am usually just spewing money. I blame my own lack of multi-tabling skills for much of my dismal winnings last year. Two tables. This means I won't be playing 1,000-1,500 hands a day like I did last year. So far this month, I've gotten in 6378 hands, and made about 10 big bets. .15BB/100 Dismal. The plus side to playing less tables is that I've got alot of opportunities to scout tables to find good ones, and am not often sitting at a table that is already populated by rocks, where my edge is small. Playing less tables also means I can focus better.

Over the last couple days, I've been sitting down and reviewing each hand that I lost signifigantly (two big bets or more) - notebook, pen, and calculator in hand. I've been doing EV calculations for both me, and my opponents to ensure that I've been making good decisions. I also try to devote at least a few hours a week on studying my most frequent online opponents, so I can get better reads on them. In addition to all this, I usually whip out a theory book, and sit for awhile and do the mathy bits that I've liked to ignore in the past. Most recently, I've been working on optimal bluffing frequency. Ugh. I did learn stuff, though - like why you should bluff more often at smaller pots than bigger pots.

What would you recommend as far as addition to this plan of study and improvement?

On moving up. I'm dedicated to being at at least 5/10 at the end of the year, hopefully higher. Of course, this was my goal last year, where I started out at .5/1, but I made lots of mistakes. One of them was bankroll management.

I'm a nit when it comes to my bankroll. I've tried to maintain at least 1000 big bets for any limit I've been playing, but with $4800 coming out last year, and me only playing .5/1 and sometimes 1/2, and not winning much in the way of big bets, it was very difficult to move up. Some casino bonuses last July bumped my bankroll up to $3,000, and I started playing 2/4, only to move down when my bankroll hit $2000.

My bankroll is currently $1,181, and I'm playing at $2/$4, with a rougly 300BB bankroll, using some advice found in Psychology of Poker, regarding game selection for Tight-Aggressive players.

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For every other style I recommended playing in the smallest game they could tolerate. My advice to you is to play in the biggest game you can handle.

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I'm going to take that advice. My study of my own play shows that I still have some holes, but I'm certainly no fish, and I have managed to play just under 1BB/100 for the last 200,000 or so hands. I've watched the higher games (3/6 and 5/10), and these games don't look much tougher than what I'm playing now.

My plan is to play at a given limit until I have only 300BB for the next lower limit, at which time I move down. When I have 260 BB for the next higher limit, I move up. I have set a daily stop-loss of 30BB, mostly because I tilt when I start a downswing. I got the figure of 30BB from Howard Lederer. If it's a good point for him, then it's a good point for me. It also guarantees, with my study plan, that after a signifigant (for me) downswing, I will be reviewing my play.

So, I'll be playing 3/6 when my bankroll hits $1500, and if I go on a 50BB ($300) slide, I'll drop down to 2/4, where I'll have 300BB and try to build back up to $1500. This looks akin to the concept of "taking shots", which I have seen recommended by numerous posters.

I realize that I'm going to have to improve my play signifigantly in order to effectively make more $$ at less tables, with no bonus, but I've little doubt that I can learn to do this.

Is this a generally acceptable plan for moving up limits? How would you modify it? Consider that I've got bills that have to come out every month (gasoline, cable, my lunch, other misc expences, credit card). I can probably cut my nut down to $200 a month, which should help considerably. I also have a credit card, which can take some of pain for awhile, as it's been doing since the neteller fiasco.

Losing my bankroll is not an option. If I go on a big downswing, and find myself playing .5/1 again, I will probably just go out and get a "real" job, since the likelyhood of me moving up 10x in stakes with this type of play in under a year doesn't seem likely.

Thoughts?

[Alex424]

I think you are seriously underestimating variance. You do not have the bankroll for 2/4 and you certainly cannot afford to be taking money out every month if you seriously expect to increase to higher stakes. And at 3/6 the standard improves significantly for online games.

I would also try and ignore bonus' etc and see them as a nice add on.

A good structure that will ensure you will not go broke at any given level is as follow

1/2 $600
2/4 $1800
3/6 $3600
5/10 $6600

You will not make a serious income untill you are playing at least 3/6 imo. You need to build up your bankroll to a point where you have 300BB more than the previous level before playing that level. This ensures you don't start playing scared if you lose 150 BB. It is very hard to drop down in stakes once you are used to higher stakes.

I do not recommend taking shots at any level if you are in poker for a serious income as if you lose you can easily end up playing with a bankroll that is not sufficient and taking shots can become a far too regular occurance.

PLay smart, be patient and wait untill your bankroll is good.

I would also not get bogged down in too detailed theory,at the expense of straightforward play as written about in good holdem books by the likes of Miller and Sklansky.

Read small stakes holdem by ed miller, i would also read lee jones winning limit holdem to ensure you have not picked up any bad habits, holdem for advance players by sklansky, internet texas holdem by Matthew Hilger are some excellent books that are essentials to play this game well. Make sure you have the fundamentals before learning expert equations etc

1bb/100 at 1/2 is good, but you will not be able to make this at 3/6 so i suspect you have one or two leaks.

With poker tracker i would focus on more than just the large pots as small mistakes in small pots add up and can infact be more damaging in the long run.

[Harv72b]

Nice post. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

A few points that I wanted to address specifically:

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I suck at multi-tabling. I can play two, but any more than that, and I am usually just spewing money. I blame my own lack of multi-tabling skills for much of my dismal winnings last year. Two tables.

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Multi-tabling takes a lot of getting used to. When I first started I was playing 1 table at a time, same as pretty much everyone I'd guess. The first time I took a stab at two-tabling I felt completely lost...it seemed like one table or the other was always blinking at me & waiting for an action. I'm not hardly a big-time multi-tabler like some on here, but now when I'm "only" playing 2 tables at a time, I'm usually surfing the web, chatting, and/or playing solitaire at the same time. Otherwise, I find that I get bored with the "slow" pace of the action & start to try goofy moves.

Having overlap on your tables will also hurt your efforts to learn multi-tabling. When I started playing I couldn't even fit two tables on my monitor with native resolution...when I upgraded to a larger monitor & could fit 4 tables on it without resizing or overlap, things got easier still. It sounds like you don't really have the cash lying around right now to go out & buy a new monitor, but I'd imagine you've built up enough frequent player points to get yourself one that way. If so, I'd recommend it.

Not saying that multi-tabling is the way to go, and in fact you'll likely increase your learning curve by sticking to one or two tables at a time, but if your goal is to make good money in online poker, you're going to have to get the hang of it sooner or later.

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Over the last couple days, I've been sitting down and reviewing each hand that I lost signifigantly (two big bets or more) - notebook, pen, and calculator in hand. I've been doing EV calculations for both me, and my opponents to ensure that I've been making good decisions.

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That's an excellent practice to get in the habit of doing. Just don't ignore the hands that you won, either...in most cases the extra BB that you could have earned with a winning hand is worth more than the BB that you could have saved with a loser (in relative terms, since in limit hold'em your theoretical "loss" on a given action is very rarely going to be more than a tiny fraction of a bet). The first step to winning poker is to learn how to play tight. The second step is to learn when to fold your good starting hands. The third is to learn how to extract the maximum value out of your winning hands. In today's online small stakes games, a lot of your opponents have gotten the gist of the first two steps...what separates them from the big winners is the third one.

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What would you recommend as far as addition to this plan of study and improvement?

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Read here. Read books, lots of them. Play hands, tons of them. Study your opponents. When you're not actively involved in a hand, try to put the players who are on specific hands as much as possible. Take notes on your opponents any time you see them do something out of the ordinary, or which you may be able to exploit in later sessions. Time permitting, get in some hands every so often in other forms of poker besides limit hold'em...that's good both as a change of pace to ward off burnout, and because there are lessons that come much easier in some forms of poker than others (but which hold true in all of them). Playing Omaha High/Low did wonders for my hand-reading abilities.

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I'm going to take that advice. My study of my own play shows that I still have some holes, but I'm certainly no fish, and I have managed to play just under 1BB/100 for the last 200,000 or so hands. I've watched the higher games (3/6 and 5/10), and these games don't look much tougher than what I'm playing now.

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Looks can be deceiving. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Online poker has changed a lot since I got started (and that was only a little while before you did), but at least when I started the trek up the limits, the jump from 2/4 to 3/6 was the toughest I faced. The 2/4 games back then were ridiculously passive, and so I suddenly found myself going from an environment where people would routinely call down with pocket aces after a single flop raise to one where people would 3bet my check/raises with overcards or underpairs. Then when you added in blind steals and semibluff turn raises and river bluff check/raises...I got beat up for a good while. Honestly, I felt more in tune with what was happening in each hand the first time I sat at a 15/30 table than I did a few thousand hands into my first 3/6 forays.

Now, since Party shut down for US players & Congress seems intent on preventing Americans from undermining our port security by gambling online, the games are even tougher. I haven't really played enough hands since then to draw any concrete conclusions, but I do know that I've lost better than 1 BB/100 hands off my winrate, just since Party shut down. Part of that is certainly due to the decreased game selection on Full Tilt/Stars vs. Party, but the point remains the same. It's tough in these games.

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Losing my bankroll is not an option. If I go on a big downswing, and find myself playing .5/1 again, I will probably just go out and get a "real" job, since the likelyhood of me moving up 10x in stakes with this type of play in under a year doesn't seem likely.

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This is a pretty lousy time to be trying to cut your teeth as an online poker "professional". It's getting harder and harder for the recreational players to reload their accounts, and now even withdrawing our profits with any sort of speed is getting difficult. Don't lose sight of one simple thing: the winning players, who are either supporting themselves outright or adding to their regular income by playing, will find a way to keep playing. The fish, or at least the American ones, who were routinely losing hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, might not be so anxious to find a way to fund their habit anymore. And the recreational players, who might have dropped a few hundred into a poker account every so often & played it down to nothing, won't. Even assuming that the gov't doesn't find a way to effectively shut down and/or criminalize online poker, what they're doing thus far is surely going to make it more difficult to make good money in small stakes games.

From a guy who's supported himself playing these games for about a year now, my best piece of advice to you would be to keep playing, keep improving your game, and get a day job. And thank your wife for being so supportive & understanding thus far. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[KurtSF]

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I think you are seriously underestimating variance. You do not have the bankroll for 2/4 and you certainly cannot afford to be taking money out every month if you seriously expect to increase to higher stakes.

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I think you are not understanding what the OP is saying, or how bankroll relates to RoR. Risk of Ruin being the chance you will go busto playing with X non-refillable bankroll at winrate Y at level Z. RoR is constant when those 3 variable are held constant.

You win a lotto scratcher and add $1000 to your BR, X increases so your RoR goes down. The games get tougher online and it cuts your winrate in half, Y decreases increasing RoR.

Now if OP goes on a downswing, X decreases and RoR accordingly increases. But as laid out in his plan, he then drops levels, bringing RoR right back to where it was.

You can hold RoR stable forever if there are always lower levels you are willing to drop down to no matter what variance serves you. OPs plan is a very good one to deal with this.

$0.02

[Alex424]

I don't like this bankroll strategy one bit. Discipline is key but that is not the problem.

You are forcing yourself to play stakes whereby if you drop 50BB you will move down - i have sessions where i lose 50BB regularly.

I believe you are much better in playing at a fixed limit until you have an adequate bankroll to play at the next limit up without having to keep dropping back down.

You can't rush results

[HoneyBadger]

I agree, you'll often have to drop down after playing for 15min on a level. That sucks.

[EGO]

Thanks for the replies so far! I will revise my bankroll strategy over the next couple of months, but I want to pursue as aggressive a course of action as possible. 1000BB is too much, and 250 is too small. I haven't done the "best case scenario" of playing about 1500 hands a week and making 1BB/100 to when I should be at 5/10 with this strategy (or others). A lot of assumptions in that statement! It might be worthwhile, though. I could do it with different winrates, and find a RoR calculator to brute force a strategy that is acceptable to me.

I believe that the main reason I'm not playing higher is because I've pursued an overly protective bankroll strategy, but perhaps my strategy is too aggressive.

[KurtSF]

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You are forcing yourself to play stakes whereby if you drop 50BB you will move down - i have sessions where i lose 50BB regularly.

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OP won't have any sessions like that. I can guarantee it. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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I agree, you'll often have to drop down after playing for 15min on a level. That sucks.

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Why does it suck? Because it puts you out of your comfort zone? It clearly doesn't to OP, and its perfectly effective at managing risk. It also optimizes profit better, so unless constant switching of levels messes with you (can't adjust to different character of games constantly, etc.) I think its preferable. Most people just don't have the discipline.

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1bb/100 at 1/2 is good, but you will not be able to make this at 3/6 so i suspect you have one or two leaks.

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1bb/100 on 1/2 is way too weak to consider playing 3/6 or 5/10 soon

the best way to correct mistakes is not to review your hands in details alone and doing maths, but to post it here and read the answers avidely.

to begin with, if you post your stats, i'm quite sure some regulars here will be able to point out a few leaks.

[bernie]

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I don't like this bankroll strategy one bit. Discipline is key but that is not the problem.

You are forcing yourself to play stakes whereby if you drop 50BB you will move down - i have sessions where i lose 50BB regularly.

I believe you are much better in playing at a fixed limit until you have an adequate bankroll to play at the next limit up without having to keep dropping back down.

You can't rush results

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The beauty of online play is that you can ease into a higher limit. You can take that 50BB(or however many bets your session roll is) and buy into 1 game at a higher level, while having 2(or 1) other games going at your regular level.

This tends to make it much easier than just jumping up a limit altogether. As long as you only do it with excess BR that's over your set BR amount, you should be fine.

b