When would you move up?

[johnny]

I'm not considering moving up to $50NL from $25 yet, but it's good to gauge how close I might be getting. I see people say that you should consistently be making 10 to 20 BB/100 before moving up, and I'm thinking that applies to higher level limit. Would you gauge your NL play by BB/100 as well, along with your relative comfort and such? What's a good number? My last 400 hands are 78BBs/100 but the blinds are only .10/.25. How would you gauge a sampling of say 5000 hands? BBs or just straight cash won compared to buy-ins? Hope this doesn't sound too clueless.

[kedoran]

5k hands says nothing, your winrate will drop between each session still.
You want like 15-20k but obviously you see the tendensies (typo??) earlier. You should move up when your comfortable doubling the blinds.

[scottie_g]

Move up when you feel you are winning fairing consistently and have the bankroll for it. For $50 NL, that is somewhere around $1500 - $2000.

[bram]

Wait till you have a thousand in your bankroll, 400 hands is less than nothing as a sample.

One thing that you will need to realise as you move up is that at NL25 there is almost no consideration of what the other player has, I read the hand histories and can't comprehend villians' play in hands. People at these limits just look at their cards look at the board and that is the breadth of their thinking. As you move up you will have to start thinking about

"what does villian have and what does villian think I have. What is my image, what is their image, what have they shown down with in the recent past, how many tables are they playing. etc"

So don't move up until you have your poker fundamentals solid, ie you understand the odds of every situation. Once you have these down pat you can move up and start actually enjoying poker as more than a mathematical game

[johnny]

Great info, thank you guys. I've got a sufficient total bankroll but I'll wait until I have over $1k in winnings, which is only $300 more, and then wait a little more until my game is more sound.

[blatman25]

50,000 hands is nothing.

You need at least 500,000 hands to really show anything in your stats. When you're 85 years old, you'll have enough PokerTracker stats to know how good you played when you were 25.

Seriously though. One thing to think about is how much of a loss you can sustain and still feel comfortable.

For example:

NL25, you can lose 3 buyins and it's only $75, and $75 out of your $600 or $700 bankroll probably won't affect you much, and you can still play your best game.

NL50, you lose 3 buyins and it's $150. You might start thinking "Holy crap, I just lost $150 in 10 minutes!" This much of a loss might start affecting your play.

If you think that's the case than I would say wait until your bankroll is even bigger than $1000, so that even if you lose about 4-6 buyins, you'll still feel comfortable.

I've made this mistake before. The amount of money doesn't affect me in the game itself, but when I look at my bankroll later, I start to panic. So I have to build my stack up higher for each level I move up.