I agree with the general sentiment of shot taking, I'm just trying to figure out the reloading problem and how it should affect our shot taking.

I disagree though with sitting 20bb deep at a higher stake if you're bleeding off. Seems way more +ev to go grind full stacked back at your usual stakes.

Set yourself a stoploss beforehand. Lets say your stoploss is $1000 for your shot. You take $1000 in cash to the casino and leave your atm card at home.

Now lets say you bought in for $500, got stacked, reloaded another $500, and just lost a med size pot and now have $380 in front of you. Youre -$620 and have no more $ left to top off your stack. You may want to hit the abort btn and quit playing right there, or u can continue your shot with your 76bb stack if your comfortable doing so. Either way youre not going to break your stoploss.

IMO, playing 1-2nl professionally with a BR of $2500 seems a little reckless, even if your life expenses are minimal. Why not just wait another month or two before you take your shot at 2-5/3-5nl. Not to say the OP's method won't eventually work, I just think grinding out 5k on 1-2, and then taking a 2k shot at a bigger game (which leaves you with a workable 3k 1-2 roll) sounds a whole lot better. And more realistic. Personally I'd prefer a total BR of 8k before I take a shot at a bigger game, which would leave me with 6k for 1-2 if I busto. But then again maybe this is why I'm still playing 1-2...

fyp

Isn't $2k less than 7 full buy-ins at 1/2 NL? All it takes is one horrible day to lose almost half of that and be down to a little over $1k. That would not be true with a bankroll of $5k. If someone is more likely to go on tilt with a smaller bankroll, then the risk of ruin would be higher than we might expect.

I know that I am a huge bankroll nit though, so this thread has encouraged me to be less nitty with my bankroll.

If you don't have the patience and ability to grind up to $6k before you start taking shots at 2/5nl then you don't have the patience and ability to beat 2/5nl.

IMO, its a HUGE mistake to just jump into 2/5nl cold. Before you play a bigger game you have to be well practiced and have all your poker reflexes and idiosyncracies calibrated.

Lastly, the Chris Ferguson challenge really altered my "attitude" in regards to LLSNL. If a pro could play for pennies as seriously as he plays for big money, then why can't I? So many in this thread treat 1/2nl like some herpes infested skank prostitute who smells like rotten tuna wrapped in garbage...

THere is this poker elitism and snobbery where we like to look down our noses at the "lesser" games.

Few weeks ago, I was playing 1/3nl waiting for the 2/5nl game. Everyone at the 1/3 table was 200+bb deep and it was a super-aggro-donk-fest. THey called me for the 2/5nl game but I elected to stay at the 1/3nl game because it was so juicy. Made a super easy $500 over 4 hours

Anyways, use 1/2nl and 1/3nl as a testing ground to become profitable and then move to 2/5nl. Or, you can "jump" to 2/5nl and use that as a testing ground while you burn 3 x 4 times more money "learning" how to be profitable.

Lotta absolute statements iyp.
I play 1/2 but its cuz I force myself to play it.
This:
isnt a totally inaccurate description of my local 1/2 game.
I dont plan on being there very long.

And trying to get out of the lowest of the low stakes dungeon as quickly as possible isnt snobbery. You need to keep progressing. You need to get better. And you need to make more $. You wont accomplish any of this at 1/2. I dont think you would lose out on much if you just flat out pretended the level itself didnt exist. In fact you might be better off actually.

+1

Chris ferguson challenge was fake. Analogy voided, 1/2 is the scum of live pokerz. In cali we don't have 1/2. So the 2/3 or 1/3 game is scum. 2+2 standards my 3/5 300 game/3/5 200 game is scum on here.

So in la if you don't play 5/10+ then your in the scums.

But for you eastcoast vegas chaps, 1/2 is not the end of the world. I just think being properly rolled for 1/2 is a waste. Your risk of ruin is less then 5%.

This is what I do as long as I start with at least 80bb. I never lose more than 5% of my roll in a day, that way I always have 20 buy-ins. So if I have $8k I can start taking $400 shots at 2/5. But as a correlation, If I lose $400 in a day playing 1/2 or 1/3 I have to stop as well. A day = one waking cycle, as there is no better meditation than sleep.

My belief is that it takes you roughly One million hands (along with studying away from the table) to become a profitable player.

If you play those million hands at 2/5nl live, you can easily lose $60K before you become profitable.

If you play those million hands at $10nl online and 1/2nl live, you can save $30K+ easy.

Don't get me wrong, I don't fault us for wanting to move up to 2/5nl, I just think for the most part players go about it the wrong way while simultaneously not understanding what poker is all about.

There are so many losing players at 1/2nl that think the REASON they are losing is becuase they are at 1/2nl and the players are so terribad. They likewise believe that all their problems and leaks will magically disappear when they move up to the "real" game.

Lastly, I believe a lot of players don't properly respect the differences between 1/2nl and 2/5nl which is why most players that move up to 2/5nl get owned.

Perhaps we are arguing apples and oranges here. Sure, if you are a solid winning player then absolutely, get to 2/5nl as quickly as you can. I'm not arguing against that. I guess i'm arguing about the best way to become a solid winning player and the best path to get to 2/5nl.

Just dropping straight into 2/5nl because 1/2nl "sucks" doesn't make you a winning player... And i'm not saying you are saying that...

anyways, all my views are captured by my posts, hope they are helpful to some.

One million hands to become a profitable player? Dude that's complete bs. Your living in the online world.

The old timers never played a million hands at one level. That's some 2+2 blahhhhhhhhh.

I just play 1/2 90% of the time and sit in a 2/5 game if I know it's really juicy. I'm not a regular 2/5 player but if the game is super awesome, why not play in it if you have a couple buy ins?

I think it's silly to pass up a really juicy game by saying to yourself " I can't play 2/5!!! My bankroll isn't 10K yet!!!! c'mon, you can play if the table's good.

I'd say you lack talent for the game if it takes you a million hands to learn to beat 1/2, to the point where I don't think you'll ever be able to beat good players.

If it took a million hands to become profitable then the only winning players would be those who ran incredibly hot for incredibly long of periods of time, so no.

*grunch*

tldr;

CLIFF NOTES: 1/2 rake is unbeatable and the game is a waste of time. / <<<common knowledge

+1, lmao

No, but what those old timers did was deal themselves countless hands "practicing" various scenarios and thus in a sense got that million hands. Read Super System and some of the other older books and they talk about practicing and dealing themselves tons of hands for hours on end...

My million hands requirement is a combination of both live play and online play. Lets face the facts, 90% of players are not winning players.

if you played 8hrs per session at 35 hands dealt per hour and played 100 sessions in a year then that comes out to about 23,000 hands.

play for ten years, that is 230,000 hands.

I can't tell you how many players I play against that have been playing since the 1980s or 90s that are just terribad.

So that million hands requirement isn't so silly when you think about it. Which again helps explain why 90% of players aren't profitable. But perhaps a million is a stretch, I could reduce by a factor of ten and say 100K hands...

Now, can you become a profitable player by only playing 50K hands and reading a couple of books? Sure, if you have the talent and intellect. But for the vast majority of people, they are going to need to play more hands...

I thought that online players were FOS with their "million hands" this and "million hands" that... but after having played online, there is something to seeing a crap load of hands that really helps your game.

I think that in this day and age, if you aren't supplementing part of your game with online play then you are missing out on some serious and valuable poker training.

It might take a million hands if that was all you were doing to improve your game. But there is so much information on the internet and in books that will speed up the process. If it takes that many hands in addition to studying, you simply don't have what it takes.

Likewise, you won't be a winning player simply by studying the material. You need the experience. It's a combination of the two, obviously.

+1 and appreciate and agree with most of dg's sentiments minus the 1million hands principle

I think you're way off base here. The $1/$2 game can just be a really tough and obnoxious way to make money. I remember I played O11 for a couple of hours. I spent the first hour running over the table, the 2nd hour a little bit card dead but I still took down a pot or two. At the end of it all I cashed out $12 down. The rake was a killer against the pot sizes, and half the table was short stacked. At $1/$2!

Contrast that with the last time I was at Aria: there was the sauciest game going on at the $2$5 ($3/$5?) table with people gambling it up getting it all in drawing to the third nuts and other ri-donk-ulousness. And everyone was having a great time too!

And yet I didn't even consider not playing my usual game of $2/$3, which ended up being a table full of nits and 2 Ultra-LAGs with position on me that were making my life miserable.

Never again: if I have the $2500 in my roll and I see a good $2/$5 game going I'll definitely sit down at it. I have a lot of real-life money in the bank so I think I won't be too attached to the money but if I blow it- hey I have no problem dropping back down to get it back up to 2.5k.

Good post OP.

dgiharris, you are simply way off base in asserting that it takes a million hands to become a winning player, even online. I have analyzed the databases of over 1000 players. Most of them were winners--well over 95%. Most of them were winners within their first 50,000 hands of poker.

I suppose it depends on how you define being a winning player. I am not a winner online. I've probably got less than 10k hands online, and half of those are drunk hands.

I've got maybe 40k hands live over 8 years or so, and 30k of those are small stakes LHE. Yet, I'm certain I'm at least a small winner at 1-2 nlhe live. My sample size since I started logging sessions is too small to know yet, but it is encouraging. Plus, I'm studying this site probably 10 hours or more in most weeks, and I would say I've improved more in the last six months than I did in the previous 8 years combined.

Even if I am still a losing player, it most certainly will not take me another 950,000 hands to get there. Especially at 1-2 or 2-5. To be a winner at 5-10 and up? Maybe.

Actually I want to start a thread on how many hands does it take to be a winner live based on all of our stats.

I agree, a million hands is way off when I stop to think about it.

Also have to quantify how much of a winner...

Top be really good st anything you need ten thousand hours so lets say 100k hands of legit thinking poker plus a lot of off table time running numbers and posting or watching videos

I believe the saying is 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. I never really bought that, unless they consider that an average number. Certainly it takes much more than that for some people, and less for others.

It also depends largely, of course, on how difficult the thing is that you are trying to master.