Quote:
Originally Posted by kittrell87
I have found that I do better at larger stakes online than micro stakes, but when you make a mistake at the larger stakes it hurts a lot more. Some of my losses at smaller stakes are due to boredom "my own fault", making calls because "it's not really that much money" again my fault, and lastly due to someone playing a complete **** starting hand and somehow binking a miracle card after I piled the money in while I am good and then I lose a big hand. A combo of all of those definitely makes it harder to be profitable online than live. And I guess due to the volume of hands online and higher volume of bad players at micros, you see a lot more of these nasty beats.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON!*
There are a lot of good reasons to start at the lowest levels and grind your way up:
1.
Bankroll management. You should have plenty of buy-ins for the level at which you play.
Poker is my job and I will almost never play a tournament if I don't have a bankroll of 100 times my buy-in. If you can afford to lose a little money I guess it's OK to start tournaments with between 25 and 50 buy-ins, but think about the following situation:
You have $30, which is a bankroll of 30 buy-ins--but not really, since that tournament probably costs $1.10. Your bankroll is really only 27 buy-ins.
The next day you see a $3.30 tournament with a big prize pool and you want to take a shot at it. Your bankroll is $27 and you're playing a $3.30 tournament. Now you only have 8 buy-ins at that level (3.30 X 8 = 26.40) You can't afford to play even one more $3.30 tournament because you're too close to going broke.
It doesn't take a lot of shots at a higher level to blast through your bankroll. Don't move up if you can't afford it.
2.
You need to get used to all kinds of players.
It's a running joke on these forums that you should move up to where they respect your raises. What's really going to happen is that you will be up against good players before you're ready.
Q. What kind of players will you meet if you're playing the WSOP Main Event?
A. Every kind. There will be dangerous pros. There will also be players who are clueless but they are playing anyway because the Main Event is on their bucket list.
If you avoid certain types of players now, you won't know what to do when you have to play against them later.
3.
You need to understand how variance works in poker.
In January 1, 2017 I took $40 that had been sitting on a poker site for two years and I decided to grind it up to $500 by the end of the year. It took me more than 450 MTTs (SNGs don't run on that site) most of them $1 tournaments, to do it. I always had 100 buy-ins. I did everything the right way. I wound up with $480 in my account at the end of the year. Even so,
during that year there were three calendar months when I lost money.
You need to understand that you're not going to make money every day, or every week, or even every month. It doesn't work that way. You have to think about the long term, something like how you might do after 500 tournaments (at least) or in one year. You can not care about how you do in a short period of time.**
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*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwOJlOI1nU
**
https://www.cardschat.com/poker-variance.php
