10 thoughts on “Poker Strategy: When To Move Up In Stakes”

1. Will there be a call in show today or was it changed to sunday this week?

2. This is very true. The preflop discipline you pick up is helpful when you move up, but besides that and learning how to value bet, you don’t pick up much knowledge in the small short stack games.

3. that's why I love Portland Oregon you can play cash games with nothing but a $15 door fee

4. I hear the rake in Vegas is the lowest around (honestly I havent played there in 12 years and wasn't paying attention but…that's what i hear.)…therefore, if you are working M-F in LA, why not just hop out to Vegas early Sat. morning and play two full days out there maybe 2-3 times a month…everyone knows the games are softer too out there. If, as Bart is saying, the rake actually forces you play differently, that totally blows bro…how tf are you gonna get good at poker if you play 10% of your hands and sit around waiting in your limited free time? that sounds neither fun nor likely to be profitable nor likely to make you into a good player.

   Just my 2c. Not sure how cheap you can get rooms anymore out there, but there must still be cheap places a few blocks off the strip and you would only be talking about one night for two days of play anyways…

5. This was a great question to feature Bart 👍 but let’s get more O8 in there ok? 😁

6. Sorry Bart I disagree. I've been playing here in Vegas for 3 years with a full time job, and I strongly adhere to the concept of a "poker bank roll". I've never had to dip into my "life roll" it's a one way deposit from my poker roll to my life roll. I started at 1/2, and now I play a 2/5 5/10 mix

7. Some of the Las Vegas rooms rake $5 and $2 promo drop now at 1/2. Yes it’s a rake and not a drop but that’s still a lot for 1/2. Bellagio Aria is $5 rake and Orleans is $3 with $2 promo drop

8. The rake and buy-in cap makes 1-2 unplayable. You might as well be playing Zynga Poker.

9. Gotta love a pro who tells amateurs, "Who cares if you lose a couple grand?"

10. You learn discipline cheap. I'm a 1/3 1/2 player with a verified winrate over 250 hours in Los Angeles of 3.5bb/hr paying $6 rake. My win rate was probably a little higher if you factor in the fact that I was eating my stack, buying a drink, tipping the dealer, etc. This stuff actually is very significant when you're making $10/hr.

    It is beatable. But it's highly questionable if it's worth beating. You get trained to take super-exploitative and exploitable lines. You get trained to play waaaaaay too tight, from a GTO perspective. To fork your ranges. To have tons of spots where your range is only value or only bluffs (and you should almost never bluff when commitment is the turn and sometimes the flop.) You get lazy about ranging a guy because commitment comes so soon, so you don't get punished as much as you should for, say, putting too many or not enough draws in a range.

    So yeah, you get a stunted, distorted view of poker where instead of playing your opponent, you're paying the casino for access to atrocious fish. You're just looking for a loose range and then piling it in with a tight one, and avoiding marginal spots, because you have a $6 rake for a $10 pot. That's 90% of it.

    You learn how your body and mind change over time and how you handle sessions of various length. You learn to KEEP RECORDS and to not bullbad yourself about your own winrate. And that really does have value. For a beginner.

    But yeah, if you played like that at higher stakes with deeper stacks, you'd just get run over. You need to accept that at the lowest level, you aren't training yourself for higher stakes: you're cultivating a skill set that you will have to UN-LEARN if you expect to move up, a set of habits and behaviors that will HURT you.

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