I've been playing NL2 since I made my first small deposit on Stars and have not been excercising any kind of BRM and have won and lost a little, just basically learning the game. Now I want to deposit and play with proper bankroll management. My question is where would you recoomend that I start. I read in a lot of places that you should look to play NL10 and deposit $250 giving you 25 buyins. Is that sound or should I grind my way up to 10NL and beyond from the lower ranks? I just worry that if I play around in 2NL for too long I may pick up bad habits, I'm far from crushing the 2NL level so is this what I should master first?
Whats worked for me:
1) Once you can play 10000
hands a month and have a winning month or two in a row at 2nl, 5nl, 10nl, 25 nl, your ready to move up to the next stakes. That, to me ,
tells me im ready to move up to the next stakes, even if I didnt necessarily play up to the recommended amount of buyins for the higher stakes.
2) Man there are TONS of lessons to learn in the micro stakes, not just in terms of poker stuff but emotional/mental management concentration, day to day variance in your mood, your regular life ups and downs, youl lose money because your heads not in it sometimes, better you learn your lesson for 10$ instead fo 100$..... So its useless to rush to the higher stakes.
3) As long as you play and LEARN you wont pick up bad habits.
Post tough hands for discussions on the forum. I do that often. And I often post similar types of dumb move type hands but the people here are very good about giving you positive feedback so dont let your ego get in the way of posting hands where you did something stupid or you played scared.
Pick up and digest a good book on nl
Play hands of course
Basically play and learn to strive to improve at the same time. It will make the game profitable and interesting for you.