Moving Up Is Hard To Do

[jaxUp]

this is a marathon post and mostly morning ramblings...I have tried to separate my ideas with lines.

ok, some of these posts are kind of bothering me, so I'm going to throw in my 2 cents. I am going to be kind of a nit to all of the people talking about winrates, because in all honesty they don't mean much. Even after 100k hands at a given limit you still may be quite far from your true winrate. That being said, since not many of us have the time to play a million hands at each level, we must infer some things from short term results.

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I have spoken at great length with a couple of posters about moving up in limits, and we seemed to agree that the difficulty of moving up is almost entirely psychological. Generally speaking this means that people tend to play scared. There are 2 ways to play scared:

1. you literally let the curent money you are putting into the pot affect your play. In other words, you won't make a slightly +EV move because you don't want to see your money going into the pot.

2. you get upset about losing a 10BB pot. Then you start to lose confidence. You doubt every play you make and start playing poker well below the level you're capable of.

Either of these will cause your results to be far worse than if you are feeling comfortable and confident with your play. Anybody who has hit a 250BB downswing knows the difference between how you feel when doing well vs. doing poorly.

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The players at the different levels aren't much better. As long as you continue to develop your game you will be able to beat them. As you move up, players get a little bit tighter, and a little bit trickier. If you truly were a >1BB/100 winner at level "x" then I think that you will almost certainly be an instant winner at level "x+1". That said, you may not experience this success for several (like even 20) thousand hands because of variance. This may mean you have to take several shots to move up successfully, but the point is, if you have a significantly +EV edge in one level, then you should have at least a slightly +EV edge when you move up. This assumes that you don't let the new levels of money mess with your head.

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My suggestions for moving up:

1. Try using tiltblocker if that will help you from getting upset about losses

2. Take shots (50, 75, 100 BB's) and treat that money as if it's already completely lost. This requires some mental toughness on your part.

3. Play less tables than usual. Another option is to mix in tables. Play 3 1/2 tables and 1 2/4 table, or 2 of each. This will let you autopilot the other ones and focus on the higher stakes games.

4. Review your play. You should already be doing this anyways, but make sure you don't slack off when moving up.

5. At least when at the microlimits, try not to play without a bonus or rakeback. This will soften the blow of losses. However, once you get up to higher levels, it becomes impossible to compensate losses with bonuses, so be prepared for that.

6. Don't be afraid to move down if you know you are getting beat. As Bernie Mac says in the movie "Guess Who", "Pride ain't nothing when it comes to matters of the heart." Well, he was also right about poker it turns out. There's no shame in moving down.

7. Don't identify yourself as an "x-limit" player. If the games are good, try playing a level higher, and if they're especially bad, you may even want to move down. I sometimes play 3 different levels at a time.

8. Practice good table selection when you move up. I think this one is self explanatory.

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Here are some specific responses:

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I don't think I'll ever play more than 2 tables again because I believe anything above that and I just can't physically absorb all the information I need to.


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I know how you feel. 4 or more tables can be VERY overwhelming. However, it is certainly possible to get all the information that you need to excel at many tables. Your BB/100 may suffer a bit, but your BB/hour will increase greatly. If this is not important for you then that's fine, but be aware of it. One thing I like to do is avoid opening all 4 tables at once. Open up 1 and get good reads. Then add another and get reads on it. Continue until the desired # of tables is reached.

[ QUOTE ]
There's another deception going on in my head. Whenever I try to get more aggressive, I seem to lose more (and more often).

When I think I have the best hand, I usually don't. When I think I have the worst hand and it's checked-down or I call the river, sometimes I lose, but sometimes I'm amazed that I take down the pot with such garbage.


[/ QUOTE ]

Sounds like you're having some confidence issues. Your problem in moving up probably has less to do with your ability than your mental state. Work on that. Also, when playing aggressive, the pots you lose will be bigger, and you will probably lose more often. But don't forget that the pots you are winning are much bigger too. Aggressive poker is high variance, and you need to be prepared to deal with the swings. This means not tilting, and constantly looking at your play objectively.

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If you read this far, thank you.

[car ramrod]

this post should be quoted every time we get a thread about moving up in limits.

nice work Jax

[Songwind]

I loved Jax's post, but there's something that is working for me (and a couple of my friends) that he didn't mention.

It's the "cold swimming pool" method of moving up in limits.

You know you can play and beat $1/$2. You make money and continue to grow your bankroll. Super. Keep doing that. Now, dip a toe in the $2/$4 pool. Play one table for an evening, see how it goes. Pay close attention to how the game is different. Between sessions, study those skills you weren't using in $1/$2 as much that are going to be more important. Play a few sessions at 1/2, recoup your losses (if any), continue to make progress. Rinse and repeat until $2/$4 is where you feel ready to play.

[Pedigree]

[ QUOTE ]
ok, some of these posts are kind of bothering me, so I'm going to throw in my 2 cents. I am going to be kind of a nit to all of the people talking about winrates, because in all honesty they don't mean much. Even after 100k hands at a given limit you still may be quite far from your true winrate. That being said, since not many of us have the time to play a million hands at each level, we must infer some things from short term results.


[/ QUOTE ]

I find it hard to believe that after 100,000 hands you can be quite far from your true winrate. And, yes, I've taken statistics courses.

[car ramrod]

[ QUOTE ]
I find it hard to believe that after 100,000 hands you can be quite far from your true winrate. And, yes, I've taken statistics courses.


[/ QUOTE ]

you'd be surprised.

Online you can play 100K hands in a couple months. I've heard people say that ran good for 100K hands, and then there win rate came back to earth.

Teh long term for a true winrate is a lot longer than most people think.

[jaxUp]

here's a quote of a post from GuyOnTilt. I can't find the link, so sorry.

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GoT did some calculations and concluded that it's possible for a "true" 1.8/100 winner to win like 3+bb/100 or .5ish bb/100. Combine this with the fact that players are bound to change their play from the beginning of a meaningful stretch of hand to the end, and obsessing over your bb/100 rate is little more than an act in futility.
-James



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Come on. This way oversimplifies things. Just because it's possible for a 1.8 player to run at 3.0 or 0.5 doesn't mean it's likely. As the number of hands increases the level of confidence in the BB/100 number undoubtedly increases, but that does NOT mean that the number is meaningless after 25k or 50k or 100k.

In other words, to paraphrase Peter_Rus' idea, is it possible that someone running at 2BB/100 after 50,000 hands is really a losing player? Yes, possible. Is it likely? No. Stated another way, just because something isn't "statistically significant" doesn't mean it's meaningless.



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Eh, I'm getting questions now about this so I figured I'd specify. I ran 100 samples of 100k hands each for a 1.80 wr, 16.90 sd player (or 100 different players with the exact same true winrate and sd under the circumstances). Note this test would assume winrate is constant per 100 hands, i.e. no changing game conditions, no tilting, etc. Out of the 100, the highest wr was 3.47 and the lowest was 0.42, with the total wr over the 10 million hands being 1.95, meaning the player(s) was/were running hot for these 10M hands, and not just by a little, yet still one of these samples was as low as 0.42 bb/100.

On the subject of sample size, obviously 100 trials is far too few to come to any reliable conclusions. But these results made me think of variance and the long run in LHE quite differently. If two people playing the same game were to present to me their last 100k hands and one was earning 0.5 bb/100 and the other was earning 3.5 bb/100, who would I think was the better player? Obv, the 3.5 guy. But how much doubt would there be in my mind as to whether he was better or not? Apparently there should be room for some. Winrates just do not converge NECESSARILY until millions and millions of hands. For some they will, sure. Some of us will run close to our true earn for our lifetimes and will rarely or never venture to the upper amplitude of our SD. Others will run hotter than our true earn lifetime; some a little and some A LOT. Same goes with running cold. Some of us will find the very outer bounds of what our SD is capable of, and others won't even get close.

So what determines who among us will get rich and who stays stagnant or drops down? Better players will have a better chance at success of course, and success on a greater scale. But even a WCP could very conceivably end up having to drop down to lower limits while a mediocre player may rise to the big games, maybe never even realizing they're as good as they truly are. It might not even be a stretch to say this HAS happened.

So poker skills being equal, what determines who becomes and millionaire and who keeps playing 15/30? I don't know. QM? Sure. Maybe God DOES play dice with poker, I don't know. What I do know is that this (along with continuing to learn and appreciate Zen philosophies) has helped me come to realize that results, even on an extremely broad or lengthy scale, should be meaningless to me. And I don't mean meaningless in the sense of how I view the game now. I mean in the sense of how I feel I should STRIVE to view the game. We as a group have trained ourselves to not care about 200 bet swings, about 20k hand down periods. None of that comes naturally of course, but as we learned more and more about the nature of LHE we came to accept those things as just part of the package and we learned to deal with it. In the same way, I'm attempting to continually make myself immune to results, period. Not just short-term, but long-term as well. I want to approach this game theoretically and conceptually, without the hint of any wins or losses clouding my judgement. Ridding my conscious from any and all results, period; that is the goal. I'm not there yet by a long shot, but given what I think I know about this game and the philosophy and approach I feel is best for me, my goal is to be constantly progressing toward that state.

GoT



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Which reminds me of a book:

"Zen in the Art of Archery" by Eugen Herrigel

Well worth the time spent reading.

--klez

The whole concept of playing x thousand hands to find out your winrate is flawed. Most people do not play the same poker for x thousand hands, they learn and improve, or tilt or get lazy / play badly.

I don't think you can pin down your winrate any more firmly than 'This is what i have won' and 'This is what I expect to win'.

[DavidC]

Firstly, thanks for the GOT quote Jax.

Secondly:
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Most people do not play the same poker for x thousand hands, they learn and improve, or tilt or get lazy / play badly.


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Sure, or game conditions change or whatever, but you can view these things as an agregate, and the alternative to this is just to say that you'll never know if you're a winner, which is probably not true.

[bottomset]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
ok, some of these posts are kind of bothering me, so I'm going to throw in my 2 cents. I am going to be kind of a nit to all of the people talking about winrates, because in all honesty they don't mean much. Even after 100k hands at a given limit you still may be quite far from your true winrate. That being said, since not many of us have the time to play a million hands at each level, we must infer some things from short term results.


[/ QUOTE ]

I find it hard to believe that after 100,000 hands you can be quite far from your true winrate. And, yes, I've taken statistics courses.

[/ QUOTE ]

GoT did a simulation, 100 1.8BB/100 16.9SD/100 winners at a certain level

after 100k hands for each the winrates varied from 0.5(roughly) to 3.5(roughly I don't have the exact numbers offhand) and the overall winrate for them all over 10million hands was 1.95

if your winrate can be off by .15BB/100 after 10million hands, it can be off a ton as shown after much smaller ranges