Hi There,

first a few things about me - I am a recent PhD graduate from UK. Following my PhD I have returned to India to take a break from full-time research although I am still working on some projects with collaborators.

I have recently come across the game of poker (April 2018). Prior to this I was only aware of the existence of the game (from TV show FRIENDS ) but not anything about its rules. However I became quickly obsessed with it - in the first month I primarily watched a ton of videos and tried to understand the rules and for some not clearly defined reason got hooked to it. Next month I played on pokerstars.com (which was still allowed in India) using play money chips. Immediately following this the pokerstars.in was launched and so I deposited some INR and started playing and I was very very bad, so so so bad.
Fortunately I continued watching and reading lots of poker content and finally got a glimmer of clue as to what I am supposed to do and got some good finishes in tournaments.

Now here is the challenge I am facing and I need some advice: I am primarily interested in playing cash games and online (no live); however the lowest stakes one can play at pokerstars.in is 200NL (1/2 INR). I feel this is extremely high stakes to try to build a beginner's bankroll. I rather play micro stakes and zoom neither of which are available here!!!

What are my options here?? In order to get enough volume in and learn the game and yet manage the stake challenge? I must be clear right now I don't need to be a hugely winning player; my primary goal is to know everything I need to know about this game - all its intricacies and nuances and analytics. But no matter how much I study I will not understand the human and the strategy interactions of the game if I don't play enough so any suggestion as to how to achieve something close to that will be very welcome.

I might move back to the UK which will solve this but I really don't want to leave India right now, I love it here. UK is so very depressing

Many apologies if this thread is not suitable for this sub-forum. I am really not aware of how it works here and if the mods feel this thread is impertinent they can definitely remove this. I just felt this may be best suited here.

Anyways, looking forward to any suggestions and many thanks in advance .
(umm no thread savers here...sorry guys )

200 indian rupees is 3$

I dont think you’ll find much lower stakes than that anywhere on the internet except playmoney?

You are right about that but conversion here doesn't serve the purpose. That is why it is an isolated context. Pokerstars.in have themselves pointed out to me via email that they currently don't have microstakes on the Indian site but might have it in the future.

Additionally I read and heard people commenting that one needs at least 100 buy-ins to play any stake seriously which makes is INR 20000 for 200NL. That is not an insignificant amount within the Indian financial ecosystem. It is a significant amount to invest for a beginner considering they have not been acquainted with game well yet!

Ummm not correct - there is minimum buy-in of $0.01/$0.01 on pokerstars.eu (just chkd) with a buy-in of $0.8 - $2 which is lower than what is available to the Indian players.

Apologies, my brain goes on an overdrive to fact check. Please don't take personally!