Moving up to $10 NL cash

I'm moving up from $5 NL to $10 NL. I've reached my goal of winning 4 buyins ($20) at $5 NL so I'm going to move up to $10 NL. I definitely have plenty of bankroll for it so it's a good time for a move.

It took a while to get here. It took around 5500 hands with a win rate of 3.7 BB/100. In calendar time it took over 16 months. During that time I had to stop playing poker for a while. I also gave up on $5 NL for a while. It was a LOT longer than I thought it would take.

It was pretty swingy. I started out running well. I was up 3 buyins pretty quickly and looking forward to moving up again. Then a horrendous downswing hit. 8 buyin downswing bringing me to 5 buyins down. That was tough. But variance can also be positive and after bottoming out and playing break even for a while I went on a tremendous heater, +9 buyins. According to PokerTracker3 I've been running at 21.6 BB/100 over the 2200 hands since I started using PT. Within that I've been at 27 BB/100 over the last 1800 hands. So a nice upswing.

At $10 NL I'll try to ease into it. I think I'll try playing around 65-75 BB stack single tabling for around 200 hands to start out. That's just a tick more than the $6 I bought in with at $5 NL. After that I'll try around 200 hands buying in full at 100 BB, $10 single tabling. After that if things are going well I'll try 2 tables and see how that goes. It went pretty well on PokerStars $5 NL. I think I need a bigger monitor for more than 2 tables.

I'm going to play starting out at ultimatebet. Some of the $10 NL tables I've seen at UB look pretty good. Plus I have a 200% initial deposit bonus there which is nice and 30% rakeback. I wish PokerTracker 3 had ultimatebet support. They say they are working on it so I hope to see it real soon. I'll miss the HUD which I really liked at PokerStars. I'll probably play tournaments mostly on Stars.