Mine has bonus fun link.

ooh nice

[QUOTE=dead.money;52063531] Why are you still playing 4/8 after years of playing and posting. Maybe you should try applying the bad advise

[QUOTE=Jon_locke;52064953] I don't have a couple tho laying around that I can afford to lose.

trolling???? LMAO!!!!!!!!! because I disagree and CORRECTLY so with your idiotic position and illlogical replies...I'm a troll...then SO BE IT.

[QUOTE=dead.money;52076203] It doesn't do you much good to be an expert at 4/8 if it doesn't even let you accumulate enough to take a shot at 8/16.

so now I'm an expert, LMAO..ty! Do who much good? i don't need to play poker to make a living and have NO! desire to do so...personally, losing my money to idiots is hard to take at times, swings are brutal. Curious, I KNOW! all of you 20/40 pro's/fish aren't winning players so who are the losing players? JRD, DOUG, CHILL, CALLI, BOB, OMG, am i to believe all of you are winning players at 20/40?

[QUOTE=chillrob;52076271] And I'm sure if I wanted to GRIND 4/8 I would accumulate more than enough, but once again, I have NO desire to sit at table day after day grinding. 4/8 OR 20/40. Lucky for most of you!

No, actually, because of the way you type.
Random caps, many extra punctuation marks, LMAO and LOL scattered throughout.
Normal people don't do this unless they're trying to look stupid.

Don't forget BigBadBabar in your rants. He and DougL ban everyone who makes any sense.

caps for EMPHASIS, as well as any xtra punctuation, and the LMAO & LOL's are due to people like you, who say things like this! The way I type, LMAO! And why would anyone try to look stupid, just a cowardly way of you calling me stupid, which is ok. I can accept the fact that apparently I'm the ONLY (caps r 4u jacks) one who can't insult people.

LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!! now I'm ranting huh, SMH! Well that would explain why most of you don't get banned, you never make any sense.

Also we pay BigBadBabar to not ban us.

500 peanuts per month for most people, but me and a few others have to pay 1000 because we use racial epithets.

[QUOTE=dead.money;52076203] Here's an honest answer in the case you are serious. 20-40 is incredibly soft and not hard to win at. Bankroll aside someone that doesn't know the rules of poker but is smarty with a work ethic could probably beat the game in less than 2 months



When you have a good week or two at 4-8 and win 4k oh take a 4k 20 shot, lose go back and no big deal. Rinse and repeat, this should take 2-3 times top before you run good and have a 20-40 bankroll and skill set to beat the game. Anytime I won 1200 or more in a 4-8 game I would immediately take a 1200 shot st 30-60 knowing I'd run good eventually and it would stick

It's even easier if you just take 8-16 shots win 4-8 winnings and then 20-40 with 8-16 winnings. Now of course this only works if you develop the skill set to eat 20-40 somehow while playing smaller.

Either way if you wanted to it should take a few months tops to move up to 20-40

Can't beat 20/40. Luckily, have run hot at 30/60 and a some hands of 50/100 over the years, that funds my terrible poker at lower limits. I've been bad all along, but this streak of rungood has carried the day.

The person you should trust is ZOMG. He's got a WSOP LHE bracelet and everything. Him and DrOlsen, both having hardware. And Jon_Locke who plays super poker. And Rodeo... and several other people... there are depressingly many good LHE poker players around these parts.

Oh wait. Live 20/40? You're likely a winner at live 20/40. Play fewer hands than the bad guys. Stop all this opening for a limp stuff except in the best of games. Value bet a bit. Learn a little on how to play in the blinds. Ez game. Scrape together the odd buyin, maybe after crushing a couple 4/8 sessions. Come on in, the water is fine. It is a little more expensive, but the Colorado 30/60 games are super soft -- reputable sources say they're even easier to beat than your local 4/8.
While I was typing, two super good posts. IMO, Jon is super serious and not making fun.

Okay fine if other people are going to make serious posts then I guess I will too.

What you want to get out of poker is entirely up to you. Many people don't win and have a blast. But for many people having fun is intimately tied with winning. Be honest with yourself.

We all have a limited time to play poker. You will definitely be limited by the end of your lifetime, but also realize that things change and you may meet someone who hates poker, or end up with reduced mobility and an inability to get to the casino, or move to a place without poker, or have a child with special needs and cash out to send them to a special school, or simply choose to cash in your bankroll to start an erotic bakery. At any rate, sooner or later your poker time will come to an end and the big question is whether you have done everything you want to do pokerwise.

Will you look back on poker as something that made you happy and be glad you did it? I sincerely, truly, absolutely not trollingly hope so.

For many people, that happens when they maximize lifetime winnings at poker. If you are truly happy doing what you do, great - I hope you have a ton of fun (and even crush). But just as a warning, I thought that was me for a long time (2002-2008) until games started to get worse, and after moving up to where games were not that much more difficult, kind of kick myself for all the hours I played mediocre 2/4-3/6 when I could have been crushing 30/60-40/80.

QFT

I am not sure what the rakes were when you moved up, jon, but at this point it may be harder to do this.

The flip side of this is that you can sometimes find 4/8 quality lineups at higher stakes, or you can at least find abnormally soft games to take shots in. The rake never has an off day. The drop just crushes possible win rates. It is much higher at 4/8 relative to the blinds than it is at 8/16, 10/20, or 20/40. Agree that it may be harder to win and move up due to slightly lower win rates caused by higher rake.

OTOH, Jon's plan is sort of accepting that moving up to the mid-stakes is often as much luck as anything. Choose a path to catch a wave of positive variance up out of the rake trap. Fix the remaining holes in your game as quickly as possible, and hope not to seriously run bad until you've build a real roll for the higher stakes. All of this assumes that building a 20/40 roll at $6/hour in a 4/8 game (or pick some other totally decent WR) is much harder than shot taking and building it at $25/hour or higher in the 20/40. Turn the odd rungood stretch in the 4/8 into a shot at running decent at the next couple higher stakes.

I'm sure it is harder but you can also offset it by playing during favorable hours. Most casinos have Aces cracked splash pots etc. I know of a 4-8 game that pays something like $50 for having JJ-KK cracked and $100 for AA cracked during the right hours. It shouldn't be overly difficult to win e laugh money to take a few 8-16 or 10-20 shots.

Similarly it shouldn't be very hard to win enough at 8-16 to take a few 20-4 shots.
The hard part is putting yourself in a situation to succeed, which means when you shot take at 20-40 being better than everybody that is playing 20-40 (or almost everybody since it will e impossible if OTR or someone happens to be in your game).

This isn't easy and I won't venture to guess that most people that play smaller don't want to put in the time and effort to get to that point. It just goes back to the point that cali makes and what each persons goals are. When I played 4-8 my goal was to make as much money playing poker as possible as I realized that meant movig up to 30-60 as soon as possible

Increased rake will lower your winrate but it won't really affect what Jon and I are talking about, which is actually not that dependent on your winrate (insert gratuitous swipe at lifetime 4/8 losers here).

Let's say you need to accumulate 60 BB at 4/8 for a 20/40 shot. If you're a +1 BB/hr winner you'll have a 50% chance of accomplishing that in 60 hours. But in 30 hours, there's a 36% chance that you'll run well (and think you're a +2 BB/hr winner) and have the money for a shot anyway. If you lower your winrate to +0.5 BB/hr, the chances are 40%, and 30%. That is, your long term winrate doesn't matter that much because you're riding a wave of variance, not expectation.

As a matter of fact, you can be a -1 BB/hr loser and have a decent chance of this succeeding (15%!). The catch here is that for all losers, this success percentage peaks at some point and then goes back down, that is, if you play long enough your long term winrate drives it all. But for winners - even small winners - sooner or later you catch a 30-hour win streak and can take a 20/40 shot.

If you can externally fund these 20-30 hour shots (that is, losing $500 isn't disasterous), and externally develop your long term 20/40 winrate (without ever having played!), you're able to move up a ladder rapidly. If you have a decent job and listen to Jon's free advice, it's not rocket surgery.

OTR confirmed busto

I wouldn't recommend that anyone take a shot at 20/40 with only $480.
At least try to roll up to 1000 so you have a decent buy-in (though standard buy-in where I play is 1500).

But really I'd recommend not skipping 8/16.
One should take shots at 8/16 whenever possible and try to build up to at least 4k from there. But 8/16 is beatable enough that I think it's better to wait until you have a solid bankroll (like at least 8k) before moving up to 20/40.

When I at shot taking I mean when you have a surplus. For example when I played 4-82 6-12I felt like a needed $3000 or so. If I lost my "bankroll" I didn't really care becusse I was a student anyways and had no plans to try and make a living playing poker. So whenever I had 4200 or so I'd take a 1200 shot st 30-60 knowing if i busted I'd still have enough for my normal games. I got super lucky and booked a 200 bet win like my third time trying to run it up