By Ashley Adams | Published on January 9, 2010

Moving Up: How Big Can You Play?

I play a lot of poker, in many places, and at many levels. I often meet players, some just starting out, and others with some experience. We often talk about the game. One of the concerns that I frequently hear, especially among lower limit players, is when and how to move up to a bigger game.

I have a friend Servio, for example. He typically plays $2/4 limit poker at Foxwoods. He just started playing seriously about 15 months ago. In that time he’s gone from losing to winning. He kept track of all of his sessions in 2009. He played about 350 hours of $2/4 limit hold’em and won just about $500. He’s a conservative, tight, and aggressive player. He comes by his poker bankroll of $5,000 or so fairly easily and won a tournament this year as well for about $1,000. We talked about whether he should start playing $4/8 or even higher. What do you think? Should he? (I’ll give you my opinion at the end of the article).

I met a guy, Victor, in a $1/2 game at Mohegan Sun. He’s been playing for about ten years. He tells me he generally wins $200 or more a session and is way up for the year. He doesn’t keep strict records but he says he’s probably up $10,000 or more this year, though he only has about $1,500 with which to play poker. He wants me as a backer so he can move up. He plays mainly in cash games because he gets bored with tournaments. He’s looking at the $2/5 and $5/10 no limit games – and wants to know if I think he’s ready. What do you think? Is he? (I’ll give you my opinion at the end of the article).

You may be in a similar situation. How do you know if you are ready to move up to a bigger poker game or not? Let me help you get your arms around that question and find an answer that makes sense. First of all, you need to know the answers to the following questions.

Are you beating your current game; and if so for how much?

There’s really only one way to know. You must keep track, down to the dollar (pound, euro, yen, peso, or yuan will do too), of how much you win and how much you lose in each poker session. It also helps to keep track of the length of time you played and the stakes you are playing – so you can see how you are doing per hour and per big blind or buy-in size. Big bets per hour is generally the way players keep track of their wins or losses in limit poker. Two big bets an hour is a very strong win rate. Big blinds per 100 hands is generally used for no limit hold’em. If you are barely eking out a win at $1/2 then, all other factors being equal, you’ll need a much bigger bankroll to move up to $2/5 then if you are destroying the $1/2 game.

How long have you been beating the game you’re in?

If you just had a winning session of $180 in 4 hours of $2 -$4 limit hold’em, that doesn’t mean that you are beating the game. Similarly, if you just finished a session of 300 hands of $1/2 no limit and doubled your buy-in of $200, that doesn’t make you a winning poker player. You might have just gotten lucky in each example. Generally speaking, to be really sure that you’re beating the game you’re playing in you need a much larger sample size. Generally speaking, 200-500 hours of play or 10,000-30,000 hands is generally considered enough play to gauge how you are really doing.

How much variance is there in your playing style?

Some players are nits or rocks. They win small amounts by risking very little. They have little variance since they play a solid game and take very, very few chances. Other players are plungers. They take huge gambles – even with only very slightly the best of it. The former players will need less of a bankroll to move up than the latter players because they will show much less variance at the higher level – and will therefore have a much lower risk of running through their bankroll if they run bad for a while.

What is your playing bankroll?

How much money do you have to play poker with? To decide whether you can sustain the variance of a bigger game you need to know what you’re starting with. Calculations vary for determining what bankroll you need for different levels. But the first step is to know what your poker bankroll is.

How easily can you replace your bankroll?

For some, getting $1000 to play is simple. They have that in stray bills lying around their house – even with no official bankroll. For others, putting together even $50 is difficult. Knowing whether or not you can move up depends on your understanding how easy or difficult it will be to reassemble your playing bankroll if you lose it all at a higher stake. If it is easily gained, then you may play higher than if it is very tough to accumulate.

How do the stakes affect you psychologically?

It doesn’t matter whether or not you have enough money, theoretically, in your bankroll to play at a higher stakes if you, psychologically, don’t feel comfortable playing at that level. The are millionaires, even billionaires, who just don’t feel comfortable gambling higher than $3/6 limit or $1/2 no limit. Sure, they could afford stakes higher – much higher in fact. But for whatever reason, they just don’t like to gamble with that much money. And if you don’t feel comfortable making a bet because the stakes are too big for your brain, then you can’t play that high. Period.

Answering the question for you: Let’s look at your answers and see what it will take for you to move up.

First of all, if you’re not beating your current game then, most of the time, it’s a mistake to move up. Learn to beat the lower stakes games first. There’s one exception to this that I’d make. Lower stakes poker games can be more heavily raked than the higher stakes games. This is a function of the maximum rake allowed. (Bigger games, with bigger pots, and with a reasonable cap, will usually have pots so large that the cap represents a lower percentage than the percentage taken out of smaller pots. Hence, a casino with a 10% rake up to a maximum of $4 rakes a $20 pot at 10% but a $400 pot at 1 %.) When this is the case, it may make sense to move out of the lowest, and thereby most heavily raked game, as soon as possible, even if you’re not beating it, – just to avoid getting crushed by the rake.

The bankroll requirements for playing at a higher level depend on how hard it is for you to reassemble the bankroll if you lose it. That being said, generally, I recommend that you have 250 times the big bet or 20 buy-ins to start at a new level. So, for example, before I’d be comfortable playing $10/20 hold’em I’d want to have no less than $5,000 in my playing bankroll. If I wanted to play $2/5 no limit, and wanted to buy in for $400, I’d want no less than $8,000 in my poker bankroll. This assumes that the bankroll was only moderately difficult to assemble. This could be a function of a good win rate at the lower stakes game – say two big bets an hour or six blinds per hundred hands, or it could be because I have earnings or money from my regular life that allows me to assemble poker money fairly easily. On the other hand, if I earned less at poker or had more difficult assembling a poker bankroll for other reasons, I’d want a larger bankroll requirement for moving up.

The ability to replace a bankroll increases as you play higher. You must be much more conservative in your estimates of what you need as you move up. Though I’d only need $5,000 to play $10/20, I’d want more than $10,000 to play $20/40 – probably twice that. And if I ever entered the rarified air of playing $75/150 regularly, I wouldn’t settle for $37,500 or even $75,000, but rather want to have $200,000 or so.

Similarly, if you have a high variance style – say you’re a maniac, then you’d want to start with 500 big bets or 50 buy-ins. The idea is to have enough money to protect yourself from losing all of it at a few awful sessions.

There’s a major exception to all of these rules and bankroll requirements. You can test the waters in a higher stake game any time you want. You don’t need a pre-determined amount of money; you don’t even have to be a winning poker player in your current game. You can just buy-in for whatever the minimum is, see how you do, and then move back whenever you want to. There’s much to recommend taking brief stabs like this at bigger games. First of all, it may help you overcome the psychological difficulty of moving to a larger game in the future, when your bankroll and win rate justify it for the long term. It may even help you in your current game, if you tend to be too tight and worry about the money too much. Playing bigger, even briefly, may be like warming up in the on deck circle with a leaded bat. Your swings seem easier when you pick up the regular bat.

Of course there are some disadvantages as well. If you’re playing poker way over your head, without a large bankroll, you may well be playing at a large disadvantage – either tightening up or just gambling because the stakes are too big for you. Similarly, you may cut your session unreasonable short if you start out with some bad luck in the bigger game.

Ultimately, you can move up when you are financially, psychologically, and skillfully able to do so. All of the above information is meant as a guide but not a cookbook for how to do that.

Answers to the beginning questions of whether certain players are ready to move up:

I think it’s time for Sergio to move up – if he feels comfortable at the bigger stakes. He’s got the bankroll, he’s a conservative player, and so even though he hasn’t won all the money he’d need to play $4/8 regularly, he has demonstrated that he’s a winning poker player at the lower level. I’d set him up with short term goals – to see how he’s doing after 40 hours, then 80 hours, etc. If he loses $500 during any of those periods he should drop down until he wins it back at $2/4. But I have confidence that he’ll keep winning.

I don’t think Victor is ready – not nearly. All we have are his claims that he’s been winning. He doesn’t keep records. I’m sure as heck not going to back him until he can show me in black and white what he’s done. And even then, I’d want him to accumulate his own bankroll before playing anything bigger than where he’s at now.