Nothing to improve on

[Cosimo]

from blogspot: "Poker is funny. At every stage your at you think you know everything and have nothing to improve on and then a light goes off and illuminates some part of your game that was REALLY bad."

One of the things I realized recently is that I will never know everything about poker--that there will always be more for me to know. Not "probably" but definitely. Whether it's NL, games other than HE, SH or HU play, tournaments, loose players, tight players, or variables that I don't even know about, there's a big world out there and knowing I don't even know what's out there is the first step out of ignorance.

I think the quote above is one of the main reason why players go broke. They play for a bit, hit a hot streak, then think they have this simple game mastered. They jump up in limits where they are so out of their depth that they don't even know it. At every new stage, you won't even know what you'll have to learn to move up again. At each new stage, your first task will be to figure out exactly what it is that you don't know.

I think I used to think like this blogger, if only to a lesser degree. My previous jumps up out of 25c-50c to the stratospheric heights of 2-4 are examples of this. There's something new to learn at every limit. I might play well enough to still win at a higher limit, but I'm sure that if so it would be at a very slow rate (< 1 BB / 100h). I was hoping to move to 1-2 in a couple weeks, but now I'm not so sure.

For those that have moved up several times, what have been the major new things that you've learned?