well if youre buying in for $500, -5 BI downswing isnt too unheard of

Uncapped 1/2 game is likely to be played bigger than a lot of 5/10 games, and $500 max BI 1/2 is probably a lot closer to 3/5.

My capped 1/2 game I've had like 2200 and 2000 downswing. So 2500 in your game is nothing.
Granted I probably play a more looseygoosey style than you nitlords

You're a luck box, sir.

When I am on a downswing I play more LAGgy. You mother****er donked $15 into a pot of $110 into me. I am raising to $150 and shipping river with my god damn ace king. It's funny when you are running bad and some passive guy raises your flop cbet huge with top pair and shows you his hand after you fold and says "I raised because you don't hit good hands very often"

ANL said it best. Playing with a bad image is like having your hands tied behind your back.

I found your biggest leak. You play deepstack 1/2. You shouldn't be b/f deep with tp otf. Work on call/reevaluate betsizing. Many players will raise tp/draw otf and check turn. Or they will telegraph the relative strength of their hand with bet sizing. Most if not all of llsnl plays turn exploitable.

Elaborate?
This makes it sound like there is nothing you can do about having a bad/losing image.

Essentially you don't have much fold equity, and therefore the optimal way of playing is reduced down to value betting...

If we are playing the game only to value bet, it would feel like our hands are tied behind our back.

I agree with losing image=0 fold equity comment. Although this can be good when we are getting cards it does really tie our hands behind our backs

Yeah, true.
But we get to value bet wayyyy lighter.

It's catch 22, because we lose those hands, hence run bad and bad image.

I'm gonna post a question.

I have a poker-only bankroll of 2.5k that I ground up from $400 bucks (with no rebuys, I ran good in the beginning!) playing 1/2NL. I have played for 40 hours a month for about 6 months with winrates of between $12-$20 dollars an hour.

I have a secure life bank roll, but don't really want to contribute more to my poker roll. The 2/5 is fairly soft and has a max buyin of $500. When should I start taking shots? Is 2.5k enough?

Do it at $300 a pop is a good plan.

2.5k isnt even enough for 1/2 especially if you dont want to replenish if you get low

id get your BR up to like 4k where its fine for 1/2 and then take a 1 BI shot at 2/5

I thought about that, but i don't really have that much experience playing shortstacked and the variance seems rather high as I'll end up having a PSB left on most flops unless I can 3bet/4bet shove. Does that mean I'm just stuck to playing AK,QQ+ and never seeing flops?

I feel like I can beat the game, I just don't want to set myself up for a 2BI loss at 2/5 and then a 3 BI swing at 1/2 and suddenly only have 900 bucks left. I don't really mind being a bankroll nit.

Start at 10k atleast IMO but then again I am a BR nit. Also do you have online experience? 40 hours is pretty much no sample size and your recent winnings could easily be a result of variance. Atleast prove that you are a winning player at 1/2 before moving to 2/5.

I've played 40 hours over 6 months, so I've played ~240 hours. I do have a little online experience at around 25k hands, but not so much since I started playing live. I'm in the US so I don't have a very good site to play on and I'm not a winning player at 4NL probably because I don't care as much because the money isn't worth anything to me. I am only down around 20 BI though, so I don't get crushed, I just call down too light.

Also personally I don't have the mental capacity for shot taking. Even when I am playing nl100 with $500 total online I am ****ting bricks even tho my true poker BR makes me way over rolled for the limit. I find that it is extremely difficult to play optimally when you aren't properly rolled.

So you increased your roll from $400 to $2500 in 240 hours. That's 4.4bb/hour which is far from crushing. This is ofc assuming that you didn't take any money out of your real life expenses. IMO stay at 1/2 for a while and wait till you get your poker BR up at 10K to move up

Not intended as a mean comment, but if you have to ask that question, you might want to read up on short-stack strategy. It's definitely profitable to be more aggressive than that.

Not taken as a mean comment. I don't have much experience playing short. :P I buy in for full usually and usually end up with 300+ bb on the table, even if my opponents only have 50bb, they play like a full stack, so it's never an issue...

Take shots at 2/5 if you can handle losing that amount of money / thread. Bankroll rules are obsolete when someone has more money in the bank and can afford it. Also remember you have to risk it to earn it.

For most rec players willing to replenish, I'd say 5 2/5 buy ins is enough to take a shot. If you don't want to replenish, then you can wait for maybe $4k or you can take a really nitty shot now.

Here's how I take nitty shots on a short roll:

I have a stop loss (mine is 1 buy in). This means that as long as I am on the shot, I will drop back down if I ever lose a buy in to below what I had when I started the shot. So if I lose a buy in ( even to a bad beat) the first night, I'm done, I drop down until I make that $500 back, and I start over. If I win $300 the first night, I'm on an $800 shot.

If you keep doing this, and you have an edge at 2/5, eventually you'll run hot enough (just not running bad, really) to have won enough to make the move semi-permanent--that is, you'll be thinking of yourself as a 2/5 player who will drop down if his BR ever gets down to X.

Rec players should be VERY aggro with taking small shots repeatedy. Rec players unwilling to replenish only need to be a little nittier about taking really small shots.

Here's another shot method you can use, maybe better than the first:

Sit at 1/2 as usual, and buy in as usual. But every single time your stack hits $500, rack up, and go sit in the 2/5 game for the rest of the night. Psychologically, you're leveraging money that you haven't added to your roll yet, and it's easier to play well with your profits from that night plus a regular 1/2 buy in being your only risk.

This sort of shot is self-sustaining, you can't take worse than a $200 hit to your roll using it, and you get 2/5 table time in bite sized pieces, and only on nights on which you're all full of piss and vinegar cuz you've been crushing 1/2.

Mpethy, what percentage of 1/2 sessions would you say your stack goes above 500 from 200? Just curious, as it almost never happens to me--but I'm a nit who buys in for 100 to take advantage of villains' bad preflop selection without having to make many decisions postflop.

I am also a total BR nit, who actually has a good paying FT job, so technically I don't even have a bankroll.

But anyway, I do what mpethy describes above but when I have gone from $200 to $400 in a 1-2 session and even then only when I am feeling like I am playing my A game and the 2-5 game looks soft. I find it really does help with the added stress to know that only $200 of your stack is "your" money. (Of course, even that isn't your money - you won it from other players in earlier sessions.) And the difference between an 80BB buyin and a 100BB buyin isn't game changing.

The other thing that needs to be repeated time and again in this thread is that moving from 1-2 to 2-5 is not a leap off a cliff. It is a line that you are stepping across and can just as easily step back over. Play 2-5 when you are up for it, play 1-2 when you are not. This isn't crossing the Rubicon.