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How Hard is it to Move Up in Stakes?

Posted on Sep 14, 2009 by Gugel in Data Analysis

So as a follow-up to my previous post about data analysis, I decided to find out how hard it is to move up in stakes.  Lets say youre playing $100NL and want to move up to $200NL.  Just how much tougher is the competition?

Up to now, its been all hearsay.  One guy says its easy.  Another guy says its hard.  There was just no way to objectively measure the difficulty in moving up in stakes.  But now, thanks to PokerTableRatings, and lots of data analysis by yours truly, we can have a better idea of what to expect when we want to move up.

So heres what I did.  I assumed that the average number of hands played at a certain level is an accurate reflection of the competition.  The more hands played, the weaker the competition.  The less hands played, the stronger the competition.  The data below supports that correlation.

Now, as you can see, theres a big drop in the number of hands played when you go from $50NL to $100NL and relatively small drop from $600NL to $1000NL.  So the theory is that:

• A big percentage decline in the number of hands played from the previous level means its hard to move up
• A small percentage decline in the number of hands played from the previous level means its easy to move up

So in other words, its relatively tougher to move up from $50NL to $100NL than it is to move up from $600NL to $1000NL.  Heres a pretty graph to illustrate that point.  The lower the Difficulty Index, the easier it is to move up to that level from the previous level.

To make it even clearer, heres an easy to read chart.

But I wasnt done yet.  I wanted to squeeze every drop of insight I could out the data.  Maybe some levels have fewer hands played than what wed expect.  If thats the case, that would mean that heads up poker market has not properly adjusted to the market conditions and there was a window of opportunity.

Average number of heads up hands played per day on Full Tilt

The blue line is the actual average number of heads up hands played on Full Tilt per day.  The red line is the predicted number of hands played.  As you can see, it looks like the HU poker market has adjusted pretty damn well.  Damn the efficiency of those free markets!

• $100NL and $600NL are slightly undersaturated
• $1000NL is slightly oversaturated

There arent really any big windows of opportunity, but that doesnt mean you shouldnt move up.  All you have to do is win more than half your current winrate to make it worthwhile!  Just get ready for some sick swings and unless your moving up from $600NL to $1000NL, dont expect it to be easy