[jbrock]

This thread seems to come up all of the time. You HAVE to learn how to beat the bad players at the $25 game. At the higher stakes ($100-$200 where I play) your main profit comes from the 2-3 bad players at the table (hopefully) who play like the $25 players. They limp and call a raise with A8o. They might turn 2 pair and crack your AK.

You have to learn to read their bets and put the bad players on a range of hands. When they play back at you, what does that mean? What does their weak leading bet into you mean?

Most of the players at the "higher" stakes do play ok ABC poker and that means it is easy to dump marginal holdings against them when they check raise you on the turn. However, until you can beat a table of bad players, you shouldn't move up. Accept the variance and the higher winrate and learn to play poker.

I personally think the hardest thing in poker is learning the hand range to put someone else on and when to turn the aggression OFF. To minimize the losses when you are probably beat even though you should be ahead if they were playing "good" poker. Is this a person who will call potsized bets on the flush draw? When the flush hits on the river, do you fold or call the all in? All of these are read dependent.

At the lower limits you can just play your own cards and do well, but you have to accept the higher variance that goes with it.