Shot Taking

Also known as: taking a shot, shot-taking, moving up

Temporarily playing a stake above your bankroll's comfort level, with a pre-set drop-down rule if it goes badly.

A shot is a controlled experiment: you play one level higher than your bankroll strictly allows, to test the games and build comfort, while capping the downside in advance.

The whole thing lives or dies on rules set before you sit down:

A loss budget. Commit a fixed number of buy-ins to the shot — commonly 3–5 bi. Lose them and you drop back immediately, no renegotiation mid-tilt.
A success trigger. Decide in advance what "it worked" means — e.g. reach a roll that satisfies your normal buy-in count for the new stake.
Game selection. Take shots when the higher game is soft, not just because you're running hot. A shot into a table of regs is gambling; a shot at a whale's table is +EV.

Shot-taking is how you move up faster than pure 30-buy-ins-then-graduate discipline allows, without exposing the whole roll. The error pattern is the silent creep: taking a shot, losing the budget, and not dropping back — that's not a shot, that's playing over-rolled-down and inviting risk of ruin. Log every shot in the Bankroll Tracker so the rule is enforced by data, not mood.

Example

A 100NL reg with a $3,000 roll wants to test 200NL. He earmarks 3 buy-ins ($600) and waits for a table with a known recreational deep-stacked. Rule: if the $600 is gone, back to 100NL until the roll hits $4,000; if he's up $600, the shot becomes permanent. Either way the other $2,400 of his roll is never at 200NL risk.