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Author : Gene Betts (Adaon on THF)
Article Written : 28th September 2006
Maybe you just want to play and don't really care about winning and loosing, or maybe you are an aspiring pro, either way good bankroll management is key.I'm sure we have all heard or seen on TV stories about people gambling away the car, the house, the retirement savings, even their accordion. Don't be that guy! (I'm not just talking about the accordion here). Many of the top pros have gone "broke" more then once, loosing everything in their bankroll, you should have no fear of this happening to you. If you lost every single penny in your bankroll, it should not effect your lifestyle in the least. To start out with, I would suggest not having your bankroll exceed 1-5% of your take home pay if you are an amateur.
Managing Your Bankroll
If you want to be a pro poker player, you can put more money to a bankroll, but you should have at least 3 months of living expenses (food, rent, etc) completely seprate from your bankroll. It would also help if you were still working, even just part time when you start out. This will take a lot of pressure off you.
You may have noticed a recurring theme so far: you should not feel pressure to win. You want losing to just mean a little bit of annoyance in between winning. When you do this, you will keep yourself from deviating from playing winning poker, which may produce some short term success, but in the long term it will cost you money. When you can always afford to lose what's in front of you, you lose the "OH MAN, HOW COULD THESE LUCKY DONKS PLAY THIS WAY!?" effect, instead your reaction is "Oh well, so I lost a little bit here, it doesn't really hurt me. In fact, they are playing so weak I think I'm justified in rebuying and maybe coming out of this table a winner." Personally, I like to have the second one on my side, let the other guy go on tilt because he lost a "lot" of money, I know I'm fine so I'll just keep playing normally with confidence I'll win my money back by playing well instead of trying to "make something happen."
Let's take a moment to review:
- Your bankroll should be a fraction of your income, so that you are under no pressure.
- Your buy in to a table should be only a fraction of your bankroll, again so that you are under know pressure.
Now let's cover the second topic in more detail. What should your buy in to a table be? For no limit games, you should plan on bringing the maximum the table will allow. So if you want to play at a NL$100 table, you should plan on buying in for $100. Now if you get to the table, and the highest amount of chips anyone has is $73.50, you only need to bring $74. You always want to keep enough chips in front of you that if possible, you have everyone else at the table covered, this is also true in pot limit games. If you do anything less, you are handicapping your ability to win money, and you don't want to do that. So your simple rule of thumb for no limit games is to be able to buy in for the table maximum.
How much of your bankroll should a buy in be? This answer will vary slightly based on who you ask, but most experts will answer in the range of 1/10. Meaning you have 10 full buy ins, but I like to have more. 15 is a good number, if you are playing 3 tables at once, and went broke on every one of them, you would have to repeat that 5 more times before you went completely broke. Having an overly large bankroll protects you from variance, meaning that when people are getting lucky and their draws all hit against you when you did a good job of giving them incorrect pot odds, you won't feel a strain on your bankroll.
Keeping the pressure off yourself let's you play at your best. Here is an experiment to try if you don't believe me: take all the money you have on one site, and put it all in play at just one table. It takes guts to do this, it also takes being crazy. If your realize it or not, a part of you understands mitigating your risk. Even if the very first hand you were at that table, with ALL your money in play, and 2 players went all in in front of you, and you have AA. There is that little part of you thats going to say "Aces or not, this is ALL of my money." You see, even if you have AA vs KK and are about 82% to win, how sure are you that this hand isn't part of that 18% of the time? However when that happens to you when you have another 14 buy ins for this table, you can safely call without any pressure, and it's a great chance to make some money!
For limit hold'em, you can have less buy ins, ten will be plenty. The downside to limit is you can't win money as quickly, the upside is you can't loose it as quickly either. That AA vs KK hand will probably get capped preflop, costing you 2 big bets. If it went bet-call the rest of the hand, you would invest a total of 4.5 big bets, if your bankroll is 300 big bets, you can easily afford to loose 18 of these, knowing that you will win 82 more of them.
Let's Recap
Let's recap some basic rules:
- Your bankroll should be a fraction of your income.
- Your buy in should be a fraction of your bankroll.
- For No limit, and Pot limit games you should buy in to the table for the maximum, and have another 14 full buy ins in your bankroll.
- For limit games, you should buy in for about 30 Big Bets, and have another 10 full buy ins in your bankroll.
- Good bankroll management keeps the pressure off you, letting you always play your best poker.
Now here are some good ways to help pad your bankroll. First, use deposit bonuses. If you look on the left side of the THF forums, there is a menu option that reads "THF Bonus Guide." Looking at that right now, you could get a $100 bonus on party, up to $600 on full tilt, $750 for jetset, $500 for absolute. With just those 4 sites, you could get about $2,000 in bonus money. A second thing you can do is take advantage of sites with bonus points programs. By just playing ring games on a prima poker affiliate you can gain entry in to a $15,000 freeroll, other sites like ultimate bet will let you used those bonus points to buy in to regular tournaments. One last thing you can do for your poker bankroll is earn outside money for it. Some people will do this by taking online surveys (can be worth up to $200 a month) some will play blackjack to take advantage of online casino deposit bonuses, or you may just work a part time job and that money goes straight to poker.
Conclusion
I want to mention one last big thing, and it is the best thing you can possibly do for your bankroll: play well. It may seem a little silly to say that, but it's true. Learning to play well will help your money go further because you are winning. You can read books, you can look for a mentor to help you learn the game better, and you can post hand histories to forums like THF to get feedback on how you did, and what you should do. There is a lot of good advice out there waiting for you to read it, take advantage of that and your bankroll will thank you.
See you across the table. Gene
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