Are you ready to move up in stakes?

Ask this question anywhere and you'll get a bankroll number back. Twenty buy-ins, twenty-five, forty, depending on who's answering. The number isn't wrong — it's just the easy half of the question, and it's not usually the half that gets people into trouble.

The bankroll half

The usual conventions — and they really are conventions rather than laws:

Two things these numbers tend to leave out. Your expenses are part of your risk: if a trip costs you three buy-ins before you even sit down, your effective roll is smaller than your balance says. And your life is part of it too — a roll you also pay rent from isn't really a poker bankroll, it's a shared account, and it needs more cushion rather than less.

The evidence half

This one is harder, because beating your stake isn't a feeling and a good month isn't proof. The sample it takes to really know is bigger than most of us would like.

Fifteen hundred hours is a year of full-time play, or three or four years of a serious part-time schedule. That's the real scale of "I beat this game", and it's worth knowing even if you decide to move up well before you get there.

Which brings us to the classic trap. Over a few hundred hours, a losing player on a good run and a winning player on a normal one look exactly the same in the results. Moving up on the back of a heater is probably the most common way players go broke — not because the new game is unbeatable, but because they weren't really beating the old one either, and the bigger swings just showed it faster.

What to look at in your own records

The good news is that none of this needs new information. It's about reading what you already have, in a particular order:

1. Filter to one stake. A blended win rate across every game you've ever played won't answer this. Save it as a dataset so you can come back to it without rebuilding the filter every time.
2. Count hours, not sessions. Two hundred sessions sounds like a lot, but if they average ninety minutes that's 300 hours, which isn't quite enough to conclude much.
3. Read the win rate next to the standard deviation. The rate tells you what happened, the deviation tells you how much of it could have been luck. A modest rate with a big deviation over a small sample isn't really evidence yet.
4. Look at the shape, not just the total. A progress graph that climbs steadily reads very differently from one that's flat for nine months and then jumps. The second one is mostly a single good weekend.
5. Compare yourself against yourself. If you've played the stake above before, even briefly, compare the two directly. And check whether your rate at the current stake is still improving or has plateaued — a plateau is honestly a better argument for moving up than a heater is.

If you'd like to see what the swings look like before you actually meet them, the variance simulator will run your own win rate and deviation forward at the new stake, and show you the downswings a player with your numbers should expect, along with your risk of ruin with the roll you really have. Much better done before than after!

Take a shot instead of taking the leap

The move doesn't have to be permanent, and treating it as permanent is a good part of what makes it scary. A shot is just a bounded experiment: decide in advance how many buy-ins you're willing to risk, and what result sends you back down.

• Set the stop before you sit. Three buy-ins, five, whatever you've picked — but picked beforehand, not at the table.
• Track the shot separately. Tag those sessions so you can read them on their own. A shot mixed into your normal results won't teach you much.
• Have a move-down rule, and mean it. Going back down for a while is a perfectly normal part of moving up — most of the players who made it stick have done it at least once, and it's what lets you take another shot later without any drama.

What actually changes at the next stake

Two things, and the players are only one of them.

Your edge shrinks, because the field is better. That's expected, and it's why 8 BB an hour at one stake doesn't become 8 BB an hour at the next — it becomes something smaller, in bigger blinds. Whether that's a raise depends on the arithmetic, not on the prestige.

And the swings turn up in a currency you're not used to. The same number of big blinds is the same variance in theory, and a completely different experience in practice, because now the figures on the screen are the ones that make you flinch. Plenty of players move up on a perfectly sufficient roll and still tilt, simply because they'd planned for the maths and not for how it would feel.

What to watch while you're up there

Your results won't tell you much for a good while, so it's worth paying attention to two things your records can't really capture.

Can you still spot the mistakes? At a stake you beat, you notice things almost without trying — someone sizing wrong on the river, the player who never bluffs the turn, the one folding far too much from the blinds. So sit down at the new table and ask yourself what you're seeing. If the play just looks... fine, and nobody seems to be doing anything wrong, take that seriously. It usually means one of two things: the field really is better, or you're spending so much attention just keeping up that you've stopped reading anyone at all.

Being able to follow what's going on, without feeling overwhelmed by it, is a big part of whether you belong in the game. If you're not there yet, going back down for a bit is a perfectly good answer — the game will still be around later.

And how do you actually feel? Check in with yourself every hour or so. Are you excited? A bit stressed? Are you playing the same game you played one stake below, or has something quietly shifted? Two things happen a lot:

• You get more conservative — folding hands you'd have played happily last week, passing up thin value, letting people run you over, because the numbers on the felt suddenly feel big.
• Or the opposite, you overplay, because somewhere in your head you've decided a tougher game means you need to do something fancier than whatever got you here.

They're really the same mistake, which is letting the stake play instead of you. And if you catch yourself doing either, that's good news — noticing it is most of the fix.

It's worth writing down after the session too, because it's exactly the kind of thing you'll have forgotten by the next one. A custom field with a few values you pick yourself — calm, tense, distracted, whatever works for you — is an easy way to do it, and after twenty sessions you can put it next to your results and see whether it lines up.

So track the new stake as its own thing from day one, and give it the same sample you gave the last one before you decide anything about it. Good luck up there!

Related: what a good live win rate looks like and how long a session should be — the second one matters more at a higher stake, where a tired hour costs you more.

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