Assessing Your Comfort Level

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Are you ready to move up to higher stakes? How can you know when you are?

These questions are on the minds of most serious players at least some of the time. Conquering your current game and moving on to bigger and better things is the goal of most players.

Most discussion about moving up I see covers two topics: winrate and bankroll. If you’ve achieved such-and-such a winrate over so many hands and you have at least this number of buyins in your bankroll, go for it!

Winrate and bankroll are obviously important factors, but others are important as well. In this article and my next two I’ll talk about some of these other factors. Today I’ll discuss assessing your comfort level.

Money Comfort

Before you move up, you should be very comfortable in the game you’re currently playing. The first key to being comfortable is that the stakes don’t bother you. You can have a horrible day and it won’t really faze you. While you’re playing, you literally never have the thought, “Gee, that’s a lot of money.”

I don’t mean that running bad doesn’t bother you. Running bad bothers nearly everyone at least a little bit. I mean that the money doesn’t scare you. When you’re running bad, you’re frustrated because losing is frustrating from a competitive or gaming standpoint, not because it’s a whole lot of money to you.

I think this is critical because every time you say to yourself, “Wow, that’s a lot of money,” you risk making a bad decision as a result. Furthermore, once you do move up, you’re virtually guaranteed to say, “Wow, that’s a lot of money,” to yourself for a while after you take that first shot. In other words, you’re going to make some bad decisions when you move up because the money is bigger. You can’t remove that factor, but if you move up to a bigger game when you aren’t even comfortable at your current stakes yet, you’re just asking for trouble. The game will feel huge, and you will make poor plays as a result. You won’t pull the trigger on some good bluffs, you will get pushed out of pots too much, you’ll be less willing to flip when you should, and so forth.

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