Plus $17,501 in 1,315 hours.

Ultimately moving up stakes and bankroll requirements depends more on personal circumstances. It's rare but there's people out there who should skip 1 2 altogether and just jump into 2 5. Usually they have income to replenish their roll if things don't go well and are good enough that they'd be wasting their time at 1 2.

There's others who might have grinded out 100 buys in for 2 5 by playing 1 2 and they still might not be ready skillwise to move up.

Also not everyone has a lot of options. If the only games offered near you are 1 2 or 5 10... well surely you aren't going to Grind out 250 buy ins before taking a shot.

Trying to have a steadfast rule "x buy ins to play this game" is pretty ridiculous because looking at someone's personal circumstances and making a decision that suits them and only them is neither that difficult nor time consuming.

I'm wondering what you guys think of roll requirements for a short stack strategy as follows:

£1/£2NL 5% rake capped at £10. Soft game, 50% bad regs, 50% awful rec players. Lots of tournament players who bust their tournaments early evening then play cash even though they don't get the differences between the two games.

40bb buy in and top off to stay around 40bb.
10% of BR table limit unless I got there via my first 40bb.
Otherwise I get up and rebuy at 40bb after 2hrs away from tables as per the casino rules.

I'm lucky enough that I don't need to take any living expenses from my roll.

I've played 72 hours this year using this plan starting with a £400 (5 buy ins). Now I have £2,000 of winnings and withdrew my £400 original stake.

I've won in 9 out of 12 sessions with my losses being £2 £20 and £90. However, I have been -£200 maybe twice mid session.

I haven't run particularly well over this 72 hours despite the excellent win rate. I've played 2 million hands online so I know what run good is (and run bad!). This 72 hours live would have been run bad online and have produced a loss. I only won live because the game is so soft.

I play pretty conservatively, letting hands go in most marginal spots and only continuing when I think I'm well ahead. Low profit but low variance is my approach while under rolled.


I want to know your opinions on three things:

How sustainable do you think this plan is? I'm pretty good at managing boredom while short stacked and I get some relief by playing deep at the end of every other session so psychologically I can do it indefinitely. I'm worried that I could still hit a really bad patch and lose multiple 40bb buy ins (like 10+) and whether I'd be motivated enough to stick at it after that. What's the chance of a 10+ 40bb buy in loss in a soft game basically?

How big should I build my roll before withdrawing profits assuming I continue using this plan of 40bb buy ins?

How big should my roll be if I want to start buying in for £400 (200bb table maximum) and open up my game to exploit weak/tight regs as well as just value towning fish?

Please tell me this is 1/2.

In 950 hrs I had one 10bi downswing.


I have now had 2 in the past 100 hrs. Frustrating. But I've still made over $3K since restarting. Perspective.

At the ~1800 hr mark of my 1/3 NL game (which at the time I was beating for slightly over 9 bb/hr), I had never officially booked a 5 BI downswing ($300 max BI, so $1500). I then went on a ~9.5 BI downswing.

Gifyouplaylongenough,****willhappenG

Geez man, i think you are ready to move up to 2-5. You should have a nearly 50k roll now no? Or perhaps life expenses...

Well this makes me feel better about some of my results. September was a +-5BI yoyo. (**** PLO and RxR)


Yup. I don't want to continually harp on the "sample size" argument, but this is very true. 100 hrs is nothing, 500 hours can still be variance in either direction, and after 1-2k hours there's no guarantee you've seen everything that can go wrong/right.


I've been operating on about a 10BI roll for quite a while now (I can refresh from life money if I really needed to now) and it's very frustrating playing that way. A couple of bad days and you're stuck in a tough spot. The combination of tapping the roll for a few things and some marginal running has really hurt.

I'd tell a new player to just jump right in with 2-4 BI and get started, no need to wait any longer than that. For a rec player 50BI seems too deep to be realistic, although it makes a lot more sense for a "pro" that's living off winnings.

Can't remember the last time I saw a 2/5 NL game run in my room; probably been over a year now (although it perhaps runs during times I'm not there, such as later at night).

Gplaysintboththebiggestandsmalleststakesgameinmyro omG

I'm at a little over 756 hours the past 12 months for $26.4 1 per hour. mostly 1/2.

Had a stretch of 256 hours making 2.99 per hour. Tough game sometimes.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

I want to just take the time and thank everyone for thus far keeping this thread civil. I think this thread is going in the right direction. Keep it going guys.

* so tempted *

GtakesafastpitchdownthemiddleoftheplateG

So GG you had one nearly 10BI downswing in 1,800 hours and nothing over 5BI previous to that?

Sounds pretty manageable. How would you see buying in shorter (40bb vs 100bb) affecting the rate at which you experience such a big loss, all else being equal but assuming you play appropriately to your stack size?

I agree with this in the way that you mean it, but I would like to add something. I think saying "you need x buy ins for y stake" is ridiculous as well if it us used as a blanket statement for everyone. I think it is important though to have hard fast rules like this on an individual basis. What I mean is that to be successful you need discipline and that entails setting BR requirements for yourself.

After someone has taken everything into consideration they should set hard numbers to reach before moving up, as well as hard numbers for when to move down. It is just so easy to be overconfident when running good and telling yourself that you are ready to move up when you really may not be, as well as convincing yourself to not move down when you may need to. So x buy ins for y stake shouldn't apply to everyone across the board, but each individual should set x buy ins for y stake based on their own play and stick to it rigidly.

If you are playing with a shorter stack and passing up on marginal but +ev spots (which you stated in a previous post) then your winrate will be lower than if you were playing deeper and not passing up on marginal spots. The higher your winrate, the lower variance you can expect. The lower your winrate, the more variance you should expect.

So to answer your question you should experience these "big losses" more often if you are playing short stacked and passing up on what you see as marginal and high variance spots.

I could be wrong here. Someone please correct me if I am.

You might see more sequences where you lose 5BI in a row by buying in short (higher variance), but that 5BI will cost less in real dollars than losing 5BI at a larger stack size. Buying in for 40bb instead of 100bb would have to cause downswings more than twice as large to be worse. (roughly)

Yeah, I would guess this.

Course, it's all situation dependent. Just cuz you are playing with 100bb in front of you instead of 40bb (I always sit at 100bb, for instance), doesn't necessarily your opponents are sitting with the same in front of them.

GcluelessdownswingnoobG

Ya I don't buy that. Variance has nothing to do with the slope of your line. Saying you'll have higher or lower variance because your winrate is higher or lower doesn't seem right. You'll have more losses if your winrate is lower but that says nothing about the amplitude of that variance. Open folding every hand is zero variance but less effective than any huger variance winning strategy.

I'm not sure I buy it either. But it's come up ITT a few times and people have stubbornly pointed at an equation for variance that has winrate in the denominator. Have had arguments about it and made exactly your point.

I could see the argument for a higher amplitude variation by buying in short and getting into a lot of flippy spots though. Which is what I was thinking in regards to 40bb vs 100bb.

Very few people use the word "variance" to mean how far you are currently from your true win rate. It's mostly used to mean the (mostly negative) swings in your bankroll.

How can variance mean how far you currently are from your true win rate when people are always talking about how you can almost never know your true win rate?

OK I guess what I'm really trying to do is find a buy-in + strategy combination with which I can achieve an acceptable (to me) risk of ruin with the smallest possible bankroll whilst still standing a chance of actually winning.

Reason is that I'm trying to find a balance between two things:

1) My desire to improve my game and find out if I can actually win over a meaningful sample.
2) Pressure from family/friends for me to a) not lose much money b) find out if I can win ASAP and if not then stop spending so much time on poker!

It is a fine line to tread.

I feel like I'm finally feeling my way to a satisfactory solution but I guess only time and hands played will tell.

My assumption is these variables are all unknown except in the rear view mirror once you played enough hands. Till then, and whenever you're actually going to play more hands now or in future then they are just concepts that help you think about the nature of the task. They can't be measured or calculated in real time.

Best you could do is estimate true win rate from previous experience and then you can plot your results and measure variance from where you'd be if you just won steadily at your estimated win rate.

Variance gets misused as a term a ton.

It simply means deviation from expected (average) result.

But a lot of people use variance to mean "downswing". It is a term that might be misused more often than it is used correctly.

... so while WR shows up in a formula - that is because WR is your average (expected) result.

High variance / low variance / etc however is not a function of winning/losing/trend.