{"id":744,"date":"2011-03-31T02:05:42","date_gmt":"2011-03-31T06:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/?p=744"},"modified":"2011-04-02T02:16:43","modified_gmt":"2011-04-02T06:16:43","slug":"starting-poker-stakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/starting-poker-stakes","title":{"rendered":"Starting Poker Stakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One dilemma that many beginning poker players face involves what stakes they should initially play. Most players choose to begin with freerolls because of the fact that A) they&#8217;re free, and B) they offer weaker players. However, you don&#8217;t necessarily have to start with freerolls if you already have a solid bankroll. Going further, it&#8217;s probably best that you don&#8217;t begin in freerolls because the competition level is so bad that you won&#8217;t learn anything.<\/p>\n<p>So does this mean that you should start at the lowest cash game and\/or tournament levels such as $0.01\/$0.02 and $0.10 buy-in sit and go&#8217;s? Again, starting this low isn&#8217;t necessary or advised assuming you know anything at all about poker. Now if you&#8217;re mainly looking at poker as a fun recreational activity, then by all means go ahead and play the lowest limits along with freerolls. However, if you&#8217;re a semi-serious player who hopes to move up the stakes, you should play whatever limits you can afford.<\/p>\n<p>A good rule of thumb is to have a large enough bankroll to cover at least 300 big blinds of a certain cash game level, and at least 100 buy-ins if you&#8217;re a tournament player. These are just generic numbers, but they offer a good guideline for beginners who don&#8217;t want to play above their heads.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this isn&#8217;t to say that you should play $10\/$20 No-Limit Hold&#8217;em just because you have a starting bankroll of $6,500. After all, a lot of really experienced players are at these limits, and you&#8217;ll get crushed as a beginner. On the other hand, you don&#8217;t need to play the smallest micro stakes just because you&#8217;re starting out since you want to be able to beat your stating limits before moving up. And if you&#8217;re starting out at the $0.01\/$0.02 limits, that&#8217;s a lot of stakes to beat before reaching a level where you can reasonably earn profits.<\/p>\n<p>To sum things up, consider your poker knowledge and bankroll as a means of determining where you should start.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One dilemma that many beginning poker players face involves what stakes they should initially play. Most players choose to begin with freerolls because of the fact that A) they&#8217;re free, and B) they offer weaker players. However, you don&#8217;t necessarily have to start with freerolls if you already have a solid bankroll. Going further, it&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[310,1886,101,49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":748,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}