Looks like we're moving up (and down) again

So I moved up to 25NL just a few weeks ago and beat it for 4.8 ptbb over 18k hands. During this time i got my roll to 1k (yeahhhh four digitz )

I took a shot at 50NL and immediately ran KK into AA for a full buyin and then continued to lose half a buyin on a questionable AK hand (http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...it-t84100.html)

My roll is now 930ish. When should I move back down to 25NL? I'm thinking around 750 would be a good time but I'd like some input from others before I have my contingency plan set in stone

Don't "take a shot" unless you already have a stop-loss in mind, imo. I'm a bankroll nit, so my advice will be well on the conservative side. Still, 20 BI is the absolute minimum br we can move up on.

I personally played 25nl until 2k, moved up to 50nl with a 1.5k stop-loss. I guess a middle path would be 1.5k to move up, 1k or so stop-loss.

The problem with your current plan is that 4 BI downswings can happen at 50nl in two short sessions, or one session that's a few hours. If it happens early, before you've won anything, you're back down to 25nl.

Whatever you decide on for a stop-loss, don't gash your roll. And especially don't play so long at 50nl that you're down to $500 or $600 where you're barely rolled for 25nl.

My $0.02.

BTW... congrats on the 4 digit roll mark AFCHung, good job.

Originally Posted by Robb

Don't "take a shot" unless you already have a stop-loss in mind, imo. I'm a bankroll nit, so my advice will be well on the conservative side. Still, 20 BI is the absolute minimum br we can move up on.

I personally played 25nl until 2k, moved up to 50nl with a 1.5k stop-loss. I guess a middle path would be 1.5k to move up, 1k or so stop-loss.

The problem with your current plan is that 4 BI downswings can happen at 50nl in two short sessions, or one session that's a few hours. If it happens early, before you've won anything, you're back down to 25nl.

Whatever you decide on for a stop-loss, don't gash your roll. And especially don't play so long at 50nl that you're down to $500 or $600 where you're barely rolled for 25nl.

My $0.02.

i'll definitely think of staying for 25NL longer then. did you notice a big difference from 25NL to 50NL? i remember feeling that 10NL was so so so much softer than 25NL and i had problems adjusting in the very beginning

and robb aren't you a stats professor? i'm taking stats this quarter and this Z chart and standard deviation crap is driving me nuts. how do you teach this stuff for a career LOL

Originally Posted by AFchung

i'll definitely think of staying for 25NL longer then. did you notice a big difference from 25NL to 50NL? i remember feeling that 10NL was so so so much softer than 25NL and i had problems adjusting in the very beginning

The biggest difference between 25nl and 50nl was that everyone at 50nl seems comfortable in big pots. They can handle being 3bet pre or raised on the flop. And they play that way themselves. At 25nl, lot's of regs just give up to aggression.

There's still plenty of fish at 50nl, but it can turn into a reg-fest. You have to learn to beat the regs, exploit their tendencies. You also need better range estimates to stay out of trouble (since many of the pots are bigger), so be sure you're practicing that at 25nl.

Originally Posted by AFchung

and robb aren't you a stats professor? i'm taking stats this quarter and this Z chart and standard deviation crap is driving me nuts. how do you teach this stuff for a career LOL

Lies, lies, damn lies. I am NOT a stats professor. I just picked up stats by reading books and teaching it (badly, at first).

I put some stats details into a couple of "risk of ruin" threads. They're linked below, and it's relevant to the discussion of moving up. Maybe doing some work with the stats will help you both in class and with poker. Understanding variance is one key to long term poker success and short term poker sanity.

You can set HEM to show your Standard Deviation. Then you can perform your own confidence interval estimates on your win rate, calculate your "risk of ruin" based on your own performance, and so forth. An old thread of mine gives provides a spreadsheet with formulas (and z-score values) ready to go, and it might help you to have a real-life poker example to help make sense of the numbers, charts and computations:

Variance Tool for the Mathematically Challenged.

I gave the statistical details for computing risk of ruin in an earlier thread. Here's the relevant post:

Originally Posted by Robb

Originally Posted by spoonitnow

When we think of bankroll management, we want to lower our risk of ruin to some certain standard, and for everyone this is different. Demiparadigm, before dsaxton staked him for meth, did a really great post explaining these statistical truths behind bankroll management as well.

You check out your SD and win-rate, decide what risk of ruin you want, plug it all into a formula, and out comes how many buy-ins you should play with at a certain level. That's tailor-made bankroll management, which I thought was discussed in the bankroll management 101 thread, but maybe I was mistaken.

Edit: I found the post Demi made,
http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...ly-t22364.html

A Simple Way to Calculate Your Personal "Downswing" Stats

I teach stats, both the intro general ed course and calculus-bases prob-stat course for math majors. While Demi's post is certainly mathematically correct, I fear some FTR folks will see all the equations and just puke, rather than opening PT and doing the work with a calculator.

Do this simple exercise: open PT, filter to all hands in the database at your main level, and note your ptBB / 100 win rate. Go to sessions tab and click "more detail" in top right. Write down your Standard Deviation / 100 hands.

Example: me, NL10, 65k hands
win rate: 4.6 ptBB/100
standard deviation: 46 BB/100

Let's use 100 "typical" sessions of 100 hands (since PT uses BB/100 units). We can estimate our earnings by gathering them into the middle 95% (what generally happens) and then outliers: 10k heaters and 10k coolers.

Here's how it works using a simplified formula that's very accurate (the details are below, for the curious):

M = SD / 5

Example: M = 46 / 5 = 9.2

Now get the two endpoints of your interval by taking your winrate and first adding and then subtracting M from it:

Example:
Lower Bound = 4.6 - 9.2 = -4.6
Upper Bound = 4.6 + 9.2 =13.8

This means that over any 10k hands, I can expect my win rate to be between -4.6 ptBB/100 and 13.8 prBB/100 95% of the time. Now here's the kicker: 2.5% of the time I can expect it to be WORSE than -4.6 ptBB/100, and 2.5% of the time I can expect it to be BETTER than 13.8 ptBB/100.

For me, at NL10, a -4.6 ptBB/100 over 10k hands would mean I dropped 460 ptBB's, or $92. And 2.5% of the time I can EXPECT EVEN WORSE!!!

On the bright side, or positive variance, I can expect to be up >13.8 ptBB/100 over 10k hands 2.5% of the time, as well.

Notice two things. First, it's easy to calculate. Second, this illustrates Spoon's point: This is a decent win rate. Imagine for the moment you've moved up and are eking out on 1.5 ptBB/100, with the same variance. Then, the Lower Bound is -7.7 ptBB/100, and over 10k hands you can expect to lose AT LEAST 770 ptBB AT LEAST 2.5% of the times you play 100 sessions of 100 hands (10k for the math challenged).

That's 15.4 buy-ins. And it happens 1/40th of the time to a WINNING player who's on a 10k cooler - playing well, and just experiencing negative variance.

Just run those quick calculations on your own stats, and see what you come up with. And then ask yourself "how much bankroll do I need if I'm taking a 1 in 40 shot at losing 17 buy-ins," or whatever your Lower Bound number (the estimate of your personal 10k cooler damage) turns out to be.

If you think this kind of negative variance doesn't happen, just ask guys like Miffed and Spoon and any other of the folks who've logged 400k hands. Miffed, as I recall, was down nearly 50 buy-ins on a frigid cooler last Fall. Spoon was down 26 buy-ins (or 13, if it was NL200) in January. Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.

Just to get the math right,the actual calculation is as follows:

Lower Bound = WR - 1.96 * SD / sqrt(n) , where
WR = win rate in ptBB/100
SD = standard deviation in ptBB/100, and
n = number of 100 hand sessions under consideration.

The Upper Bound = WR + 1.96 * SD / sqrt(n)

I used "2", so that 2 / sqrt(100) = 2/10 = 5. This is pretty accurate since I rounded my standard deviation down (it's actually 46.85, not 46).

The summary chart of your personal expectation in poker is this:

Over 40 typical periods of 10k hands, you should expect:

1 cooler at least as bad as your Lower Bound
38 periods between the Lower and Upper Bound
1 heater at least as good as your Upper Bound

The math is simple. If you have 40k hands in your database, or more, you can calculate these statistics easily and accurately, tailored to your game on your site against the villains you face.

One final note. When you move up, remember that your win rate typically goes down. If you have a 4 ptBB/100 at your current level, can you really expect much more than 1.5 ptBB/100 for the first 10k hands at the level above? That lower bound for most players is going to be in the 12 - 18 buy-in range. In 10k hands. Playing winning poker.

Does 40+ buy-ins for moving up seem so "nitty" now? If it does, then actually sit down and do the calculations, dammit!! Playing poker well for the long term is all about managing variance.

Final caveat: it's late, I'm a morning person, and i'm exhausted. I will have to recheck all the math I did in the morning before I'm willing to claim it's 100% accurate. But i'll let y'all know with an edit when I've rechecked everything.

I never move up the first chance I get.

My philosophy is. Don't play until you have 30 buy-ins. You can keep playing until you hit 25 buy-ins. Then drop down until you build it back up to 30 buy ins. My room mate has at any given time 5 buy ins for his level and constantly just says "damn internet poker!" whenever he loses it, and he's a better player than me. But his BR skills are horrid to say the best.

Even live he'll have a bankroll of $200 bucks and he'll play $400NL and get pissed because his AAs got sucked out on.

$1k up and $750 down were (are) my marks for 25nl-50nl

Originally Posted by bjsaust

$1k up and $750 down were (are) my marks for 25nl-50nl

What's your criteria for 50nl - 100nl?

Originally Posted by bjsaust

$1k up and $750 down were (are) my marks for 25nl-50nl

Do you guys go up to take a shot based solely on bankroll or is it a combination of bankroll and the extent that you're beating your current game?

nice work on the $1k milestone!!!! the next thousand is easier

Based on your posts and risk tolerance etc, i recommend up $1100, down $800. I was more conservative than this, to each their own!

re the move from $50nl to $100nl, I was again super-conservative. Guess this is why I've never had to move down cos of bankroll.

But, if you have a decent (30k+) sample size at 50nl and feel good about your win-rate then move up with $2500, with a stop-lose of $1900. If it doesn't work first time, move up at $2400, same stop loss, then $2300, same stop loss. Logic being, if you're building roll back up each time then you're probably getting even more equipped skill-wise for the move.

Robb, the same. $2k up and $1.5k down. I'll probably be a little more conservative with the move to 200nl but we'll see. There are definately times I see a benefit in a more conservative approach (swings hopefully wouldnt affect my emotions so much), but as a "casual" player I'm keen to move up aggressively.

okiman, I move up solely based on bankroll, some others dont. I guess I just feel like if I've reached the BR mark I set then I've beaten that level well enough regardless of winrate/etc. Probably a bit of a holdover from my SNG days where you'd normally fly up through the SNG levels WELL before you actually played enough to have a meaningful sample. If you cant make it, well thats why you have the movedown points in your BRM plan.

Not saying its for everyone, thats just my approach. I think people should use what they're comfortable with. I tend to have an unreasonable level of confidence in my ability so like being aggressive.

why do ppl move up when they have to move down if they lose a few buyins? I lose 2-3 buyins just opening the PokerStars software.