Moving Up: Beyond Winrate And Bankroll - Part 1: 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!

I have a small quarrel with the way people use winrate and bankroll metrics for moving up. While obviously both winrate and bankroll are relevant to your moving up decision, they aren’t the only two relevant factors. Sometimes other factors are important as well, and sometimes I think these other factors can be very important.

My thoughts on this, to some extent, stem from my own experience. When I was learning to play, I played the smallest game regularly offered at my cardroom, $4-$8 limit hold’em. In the beginning I racked up an impressive record of losing month after losing month. And yet, after my sixth straight losing month, I decided it was time to move up to $10-$20 and $15-$30!

I did it, and it worked out great. I won more that first month than I had lost in my previous six, and I never had another losing month for all the time I played live limit hold’em.

Why did I decide it was time to move up when I hadn’t registered even one winning month up to that point? A few factors convinced me that I was ready, and these articles will talk about some of those factors that I think can make or break a move up.

Money Comfort

Before you move up, I think it’s critical that you 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.”

Now I don’t mean that running bad doesn’t bother you. Running bad bothers nearly everyone at least a little bit at some point. 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 ton 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.

Playing Comfort

Being comfortable with the money is obviously important, but that’s not the only aspect of comfort that I think is important. You should be comfortable in a gaming sense also.

When you switch from one game to another, your opponents will change. A typical player in the $1-$3 no-limit game at the Wynn in Las Vegas will play very differently than the typical player in the $1-$2 game on PokerStars. And the typical $5-$10 player on PokerStars will also play very differently than the $1-$2 player.

When you switch games, your opponents will play differently than you are used to, and that will cause discomfort. Your hand ranges will be off. For instance, if you’re used to the $1-$3 game at the Wynn, you might be used to seeing preflop 3-bets once or twice an hour and made only on premium hands. If you jump into a $1-$2 game on PokerStars, you’ll see way more preflop 3-bets. You’ll presumably figure out that people are 3-betting with more hands, but you won’t know right off the bat what their ranges are. You won’t understand the dynamics – do your opponents 3-bet wildly in all circumstances, or do they try to pick their spots? You have to play a game for a while before you can begin to nail down hand ranges again and get comfortable reading hands.

Before you move up, in my opinion, you should be extremely comfortable in your regular game. Your hand reading should be sharp. You should rarely feel lost at sea. If someone starts 3-betting you every other hand, you should know what’s going on. Is this player just picking up hands, is he picking on you, or is he on tilt? Why did he shift gears, and what should you do about it? How will he react to you if you play back at him?

Now, if you play with competent players, you won’t know exactly what they are up to all the time. But you should feel comfortable in the game. You should understand their general approach to the game, and you should have a good feel for how to counter it.

When you move up, you’ll probably feel out of your depth at least sometimes. You’ll get caught by aggression you weren’t expecting. That’s normal; you’re moving up to challenge yourself and conquer this new game. But if you still get that out-of-your-depth feeling at your normal stakes, you likely aren’t quite ready yet to move up.

Comfort Without Winrate

As I said above, I moved up even though my winrate in my normal game was negative. I moved up because I felt extremely comfortable in the $4-$8 game. I was totally comfortable with the money involved, and I never, ever felt out of my depth when I played. I understood my opponents’ strategies and I knew how to counter them. I was playing with a significant edge, and I knew it. I also had saved up enough money at my job that I would be well-bankrolled for the bigger games right off the bat. So I decided it was time to move up.

Poker has so much inherent variance that I am a bit queasy about trying to use winrates to judge skill. Even though I had lost for six straight months at $4-$8, six months on the schedule I had been playing worked out to only about 4,000 hands or so. It’s likely I was indeed a losing player for the first few months, but by the time I moved up I had an edge and had just run a little bad.

In online poker, the edges are much smaller than they were in my $4-$8 game, and winrates mean even less, even over much larger samples. It’s reasonably common for a strong player at $0.50-$1 or $1-$2 no-limit to go on a 50,000 hand or more break-even streak. And therefore it’s just as common for a break-even player at those levels to go on a 50,000 hand or more strongly winning streak. It happens all the time – a weak player has a good run and moves up from a game that’s just slightly over his head to one that’s way, way over his head.

If you’re completely comfortable at your current level, consider moving up. Don’t allow your winrate to comfort you. If you’re saying, “Well, I won 5ptbb/100 over the last 50,000 hands, so I must be doing something right,” you’re not ready to move up. You should feel comfortable and in control almost all the time in your regular game. Your moments of confusion and feelings of being outplayed should come rarely.

You should have control over your opponents. You should be able to manipulate them into situations where they make mistakes. You should read their hand ranges accurately. And you should be able to anticipate how they will react to some situations. In a recent Stoxpoker video, James Davis was tangling with a poor player at $1-$2 on Full Tilt. He c-bet a dry flop, and he said on the commentary, “Here’s what’s going to happen. He’s going to raise, I’m going to 3-bet, he’s going to fold, and I’m going to show.” And it happened just like that. If you’re ready to move up, you should occasionally have these moments of anticipation also. It means you understand your game and likely you have the edge you think you do.

The next parts will cover some more specific examples of playing comfort and how they relate to moving up.

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