As I’ve mentioned before, I set a goal to play $20/$40 at some point before the end of the year, meaning that I’m striving to have enough of a bankroll to at least take a shot at those games before December 31st. Given that I play $5/$10 right now, I have a ways to go and it will take quite a bit of playing to get me to where I need to be; not to mention luck and skill. But to speed things up, I don’t have to play $5/$10 all the way - I can try to move up the ladder a little bit faster by taking shots at $10/$20 first. If I win big a few sessions, I’ll be much faster on my way to my end goal of 20/40.

So.

I took a shot at $10/$20 last night, and two things happened:

1. It was a swing-and-miss and I ended up 50BB ($1000) stuck for the night, and

2. I learned that I actually care too much about the money. The loss hurt.

Really though, the money is not a big deal. I’ve been running silly hot in June so far and I can afford the set-back. Part of taking a shot is that I risk losing a larger-than-normal amount of money if I run bad, and I knew that when I sat down at the table. But I was surprised to notice that the size of the bets were affecting me psychologically as much as it did.

I’ve taken shots at 10/20 before (I have maybe 3k hands there in total now) and I’ve been aware that I tend to play more loosely and passively because of this. I don’t always raise when I normally would (don’t want to risk losing another bet) and I call down a bit too much (don’t want to risk losing the pot). I don’t want to play less than optimally, and I don’t want to feel uncomfortable while playing optimally.

Conclusion: I should not be playing 10/20.

At least not yet.

Conclusion following the first conclusion: I may go “fuck it” in terms of my goal of playing 20/40 before the year is over. If I don’t feel comfortable playing higher, I won’t. If that means that I’ll be “stuck” playing 3/6 and 5/10 for the next year, so be it.