Cash level targets and moving up.

CraigSG1

Hi,

I used to play 10nl and some 20nl and was doing well over a long period but when I started playing more 20nl it didnt go so well and I found it hard to drop down and play seriuosly and in the end lost my 'game'.

So I took everything out and left £50 with the intention of paying nl4 and starting from the bottom.

The past month has gone very well. What I would like to know is what are my targets in terms of 'beating' the level. I here terms like so many BB's per hour and so many BI's needed and such. I just want some idea as to what to aim for.

Currently i've played 6 tables at a time for 29hours playing time and made £120+ profit. Im not aggro but i'm not tight either. Somewhere in between. I average around 500-550 hands per hour.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

percival09

You'll hear different things. I always try to play around 100,000 hands minimum at any level before considering moving up, but I have heard people using different hand goals, 20,000 for example. 

I think 20,000 is too low and 100,000 seems about right, but besides, what's more important is how you feel in the games. I can play for a short amount of time at any given stake and I'll know (thanks to experience) if I'm a winning player at that level or not, simply by knowing how the regulars play. Something I think people should spend more time looking into is variance, and how variance/standard deviation works. It plays a huge factor in poker and you should always consider positive and negative variance when you're playing. This site should help: http://pokerdope.com/poker-variance-calculator/ - as a test, just enter a normal winrate, say 2bb, over 20,000 hands, and just look for yourself how volatile your graph can be over any given 20,000 hand stretch using a normal standard deviation number.

regarding bb/100, I think this is less important than hands played because you can win or lose over a short sample (as seen on the graph) very easily, even if you are actually a winning player. But a reasonable winrate to aim for is something around 2-4BB/100. 

The main thing to learn from my post is that it can take an enormous amount of time for variance to "even out" and it's important not to get carried away if you're winning a lot in the beginning, or losing a lot.