Moving up from Micro to Small stakes: how would you do it?

[1C5]

If you could do it over again?

And maybe you can offer some advice for me. Normally a tourny player who has played 1000s of tournaments. Only limit I have played is full ring .5/1 at Party to clear bonuses in the past.

I would like to get back into limit and comfortably be able to play in mid limit games online and live.

What do you think would be the best way to move up through the limits and do I need to read any other books for limit besides SSH?

Thanks!

[Justin A]

Do you have a good sized bankroll?

[smokylosecannon]

Holdem For Advance Players helps, though SSHE is still my favorit book. It just a great book that covers "basics", and that is what you need to be reminded when you are running cold. The key to be a successful player at ring game is how well you handle downswing, it doesn't take much effort to learn how to handle wins, just keep playing and winning! right? Besides that, make sure you have Poker Tracker and review your play in reular basis. Also, I highly recommend you keep 500BB bankroll. I use to think 300BB is plenty and even that is not necessary, but I kept 500BB bankroll "just in case". I was right to keep 500BB bankroll, begging of last month, I dropped 275BB in 6000 hands. I recovered, but recovering process would be much more emotionally stressful/difficult if I had to put more money in bankroll from my saving account. 500BB bankroll made the process much easier, instead of taking money out of my bank account, I just had to accept that I can not withdraw money from my poker account this month. good luck.

[1C5]

$5000 right now is the BR.

[einbert]

Since you already have a goodsized bankroll, you might want to go ahead and jump up to 2/4 or 3/6. The players at these limits are really bad, it shouldn't be a challenge for you if you have a decent amount of experience at LHE. If you don't have experience at LHE, why not just move up to 1/2, play 10k hands and see how you do. Also try to evaluate your opponents' level of play. If you are winning and feel like you have a big edge over your opponents go aheand and move up to 2/4, rinse and repeat. With the size of your bankroll, I would feel comfortable playing anything up to 5/10. 5/10 is quite tough though, compared to $.50/$1.00, so I think your best bet is to move up gradually.

A key thing to remember is that in LHE you are using an exploitive strategy, therefore the correct way to play really does depend a lot on your opponents. For example, you can learn techniques and put them to use at 3/6 that will also be useful at 5/10. But some of your strategies will need to be adjusted, because of the differing tendencies of the bad players. "Learning LHE" and "learning to beat X/2X LHE" are really two different things. Spend lots of time posting and thinking and you can learn both somewhat at the same time.

I would also highly reccomend the book "Weighing the Odds in Holdem Poker" by King Yao (a 2plus2er). It's particularly useful once you get to the more aggressive 5/10 and 10/20 games, but the concepts it demonstrates are useful in any LHE game. Figuring out what situations to apply certain techniques to is one of the tricky things about LHE, and it really only comes with a lot of practice and trial and error.

My last word of advice is, don't become a multitabling monkey like I did. When I got to 3/6 I played 8 tables of it so I could get in as many hands/hr as I could. This really stunted my development as a player, because I really quit thinking about each individual hand. Right now I play 10/20 6max and I play 2 or 3 tables at a time. One of my major goals every time I sit down to play is to think through every hand clearly, and not make decisions on autopilot. It has been a pretty long transition into this frame of mind but eventually I got used to it, and I gotta say that my results have improved quite a bit over that period. So I would reccomend that you try to do the same.

Best of luck to you.