if you want to make a lot of money playing poker there's only one way to do it you have to move up in stakes in this video I'm going to share my three biggest tips for a beginning poker player probably somebody starting out at low or micro Stakes who wants to move up in Stakes make more money playing poker and potentially turn this into their profession by the way if you're new here and you're wondering if I'm qualified to talk about this I've coached hundreds of students I was the head coach at poker detox coaching
for profits cash game stable for several years from 2019 to 2022 I led that team to over 5 million dollars in profits pretty much all of those students started at low stakes I also in 2019 moved up from 200 NL to 2kno on Bovada within a period of about six or seven months I documented that on my run at once blog so I know a thing or two about moving up in Stakes my first and most important tip is to focus on recreational players and game selection if you want to understand why this is such
an important concept all you have to do is look at the world of yes in chess there are very very few people who are actually making a decent living playing chess competitively poker isn't like that there are many people who make a living playing poker and the only reason that they can do that is because other people play poker for entertainment and it's those recreational players that really prop up the whole ecosystem and make it a viable profession for so many professional poker players I know this seems like a really obvious concept like yeah of
course I'm gonna focus on the recreational players it seems that way but it's actually not because when you actually go to play poker most of the hands you're going to play are going to be against other professional poker players at least in most pools and additionally those players are going to be the toughest challenge to play against and so it makes it really easy for you to get distracted from the recreational player at your table and instead focus on sort of this illusion that all of the professionals are competing against one another and and you
know that you have to beat the other Professionals in order to make money when actually that's not true at all according to my online database the average recreational player usually loses at around 30 big blinds per hundred that means that if a recreational player buys in for a Half Stack for 50 big blinds on average within about 150 hands they will lose their entire stack on the other hand this varies a bit from site to site but in a healthy ecosystem where the rake is not too high the average regular tends to win at about
one to four big blinds per hundred so if you want to make money who should you focus on the person who is donating 30 big blinds per 100 or the person who is actually winning at several big blinds per hundred obviously you want to focus on the recreational pick the low-hanging fruit recreationals make a lot of fundamental mistakes when they're playing poker so really any reasonable strategy you play against them will make a lot of money but that doesn't mean that you should just stop right there because by exploiting those players there's far more Edge
to be gained and I would argue by studying recreationals you can gain a lot more of an edge than by studying how to play against good players there's not a lot of content about how to exploit recreational poker players on the internet part of that is because it's not a very well understood Concept in fact many people have exactly the wrong idea about how you're supposed to exploit recreational players that might seem like it should be impossible but like I said any reasonable strategy does make a lot of money against recreational players so it's not
like if you have a bad strategy against them you're going to completely lose your Edge it's just that you're not going to be gaining the maximum another reason there's not very much content on this subject is that the people that really do understand how to maximally exploit recreational players guard that information very closely they don't want to just give that information away for free and turn every professional poker player into a Max exploit bot against the recreationals because that's the kind of thing that's going to massively reduce their bottom line and potentially even kill online
poker this goes for me as well I don't really ever divulge this information except for within my coaching programs but just because there isn't a lot of good information out there about how to max exploit recreationals it doesn't mean you shouldn't think about it you should always be using common sense and logic to try to gain as much Edge as possible against these players don't allow yourself to just autopilot and play the same strategy you would play against professionals because that doesn't make any sense I'm going to add one caveat to this and there's going
to be a caveat to every tip in this video so this is going to be sort of like three do's and three don'ts to moving up in Stakes the caveat here is that being a Savvy game selector does not mean being a bum Hunter you want to focus on how you can win the most money from a recreational player when they're at your table and you want to put yourself in games where you're likely to have a lot of recreational players but in my opinion that's sort of where you should stop I think where game
selection turns into bum hunting is when you will sort of obsessively table select and actually be afraid to play against another professional player I think you should just do your research about which pools are good to play in at what times set up a schedule and then make sure you've got a good strategy against creational players when you do run into them but don't just automatically sit out as soon as a recreational player at your table sits out I think that really kills the games and makes it a poorer experience for everybody so in summary
while I don't think that focusing on recreational players is going to be the end all be all strategy in poker eventually you are going to have to learn more Theory and how to play against the stronger players as well that's just inevitable but it is the most important thing for while you are moving up in the stakes and it should be prioritized my second tip for moving up in Stakes is to use an aggressive bankroll management strategy and to take a lot of small shots for this I'm going to briefly show you some calculations in
Prime dope variance calculator this is a website that I've featured quite often in my videos and we're not going to do very much math but I just want to show you basically that if you were to ask a computer what is the optimal way for me to manage my bankroll when I'm moving on mistakes it would tell you that you should be sort of like insanely aggressive with your bankroll so I think what I'm actually going to do here is go to my blog and I'm going to go to an article that I wrote called
you should probably stop playing zoom and this is going to have a graph in it which kind of shows everything that I need to show here this graph was made using prime dope variance calculator and I will link the calculator in this description below but basically what this graph is saying is it's your bankroll requirements versus your win rate the y-axis is giving a bankroll in big blinds so 5 000 big blinds would be 50 buy-ins and the x-axis is your win rate and big blinds per hundred so this graph is saying if you have
a win rate of three big blinds per hundred you need a bankroll of about 50 buy-ins to ensure that you have less than five percent risk of Ruin less than five percent risk of busting your bankroll on a downswing and you can see that as win rate increases your risk of Ruin goes down exponentially and this is going back to my first point another reason why you really want to focus on game selection especially while you're moving up in Stakes because if you have a high win rate in your games you don't really need very
much of a bankroll to play in the games and then you can just move up in Stakes very quickly without requiring too much liquidity so these calculations are saying if you have a win rate of three big blinds per hundred you want 50 buy-ins if you have a win rate of six big blinds per 100 you only need about 25 buy-ins for less than five percent risk of Ruin so we've got 50 buy-ins 25 buy-ins and if you're really crashing your games at like 15 big points per 100 you only need a 10 buy in
bankroll for less than five percent risk of Ruin that's pretty crazy and what's even crazier is that these calculations are done assuming that you can never move down so in reality what you would actually probably do is have a bankroll of like maybe 20 buy-ins and take a five buy-in shot every time you get over 20 buy-ins and if you lose that shot and you just move back down you you make that money back and then you take another five buying shot if you can move down every time you go on a downswing well every
time you move down you double your bankroll effectively and so your actual risk of Ruin is going to be much much lower than even this graph which is quite aggressive is saying so this is sort of the mathematical reasoning behind my suggestion which a lot of people think is a little bit too aggressive but I think it's really fun I would suggest when you're starting out in poker at lower microstates have a separate bankroll from your living expenses ideally if you're not playing poker professionally yet and you're not established you should have a separate source
of income keep a separate bankroll for poker keep 20 buy-ins maybe 30 and take small shots and then as you move up in Stakes you can start to build a bigger bankroll maybe move up to 40 or 50 buy-ins and that'll mostly just be for mindset reasons just because as games get bigger as the numbers get bigger most people like to have a larger bankroll for security my caveat for this strategy is that you want to also manage your downswings so if you're playing a really aggressive bankroll management strategy it's possible you can move up
several limits without ever incurring like a really huge downswing so imagine you know you're a 25 an hour player and you've never gone on more than like a 500 downswing in your life and then you go on a heater and you move up in Stakes rapidly you jump to 50-0 and then 100 an hour and let's say you stick The Landing at 100 I know and now you've got a big bankroll at 100 NL and then you go on a 15 by and downswing at 100 and now before you have to according to your bankroll
rules move down back to 50 now I would say if you have only lost 500 at most previously you should try to move down even if you don't have to you should not allow yourself to lose more than about 150 percent of what you've lost previously not everybody needs to do this for mindset reasons but I think most people get pretty discouraged when they go on a downswing which is much larger than their previous maximum downswing so I always suggest think about how much you're comfortable with losing at any given time and sometimes you can
just preemptively move down and make some money back at lower Stakes before you cross that threshold even if it's sort of a little bit too conservative for your bankroll management strategy to do so it's fine to do it so in summary use an aggressive bankroll management strategy but also don't be afraid to set sort of conservative stop losses because there's no harm in just going back down one limit lower and making some money back before you try to take another shot again I always say that for people who have bad bankroll management strategy it's not
because they take shots too aggressively bad bankroll management strategy just means that you fail to move down when it's time to in reality most of the people who have made a lot of money playing poker have been very aggressive with their bankrolls they were just also able to put their ego aside and move down when they ran bad in order to recover my third and final tip is to find a tribe don't just try a lone wolf strategy for most people the Lone Wolf approach is not going to work especially now that online poker is
harder to beat than it used to be if you can find a tribe where people are moving up and making more money and improving very rapidly in poker then if you're spending a lot of time around people like that you are also likely going to do the same thing in addition you're going to save yourself from falling into various pitfalls I'll give you an example recently there were a couple of sites both Gigi poker and bed online which massively increased The Rake on their cash games and it would have been nice if they had told
people that they were going to do this but instead they just kind of launched an update stealthily in the night without telling anybody and increase the rake by like 50 to 100 percent in both cases now if you're just a lone wolf and you're not really paying very close attention it could be months before you realize that the rake increased that much in your games like if you just didn't check that stat you might think well I'm just kind of having a bad couple of months and maybe you don't check your poker tracker and see
that they're raking another three big blinds per hundred or two big blinds per hundred off the top of your profits if you're in a tribe you will constantly be exposed to information like this that's going to help you a lot like hey this site just increased their rake a ton probably should get off of that site or hey have you heard about this site games seem really really good maybe you should get on there and give it a try have you heard about this poker software that just came out it's really helped my game a
lot these are the types of tips you're going to get when you have a strong Network and there's there's many more examples that I could give so finding your tribe can be really helpful but my final caveat is to not get lost in your tribe don't get distracted from the big picture you don't want to spend all of your time socializing with other people in your poker server as much as making friends with other poker players is great you have to remember like that this is also your job and if you're just focusing on that
and not on getting better at poker that can be an issue for your development as a player in addition you also don't want to get really wrapped up in micro strategy discussions if you feel like you're in a hand history discussion group and players tend to spend like 30 minutes talking about a single hand maybe you jump into the group you discuss a couple hands and then all of a sudden there's one hand that people have a disagreement about and you end up talking about that for 40 minutes that's a sign that your study group
is not really being very productive and it's just getting distracted in the minutia of Poker again that's a really good way to waste a lot of time and stunt your development as a player you should always be coming back to understanding where your money is coming from in poker and not getting wrapped up in Minor Details and micro strategy discussions all right that's all I've got for this video I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you learned something please consider liking and subscribing to my channel for more content like this and I'll catch you
guys in the next one good luck at the tables
