Poker Bankroll Management

When you first start playing poker as a career it is important that you start with enough money to do so. This means that you will need not only the money that you will sit down with in front of you, but much more to make sure you can handle variance. It is recommended to start with 30 buy ins of whatever limit it is you choose to play. If you start playing at $10 no limit then you should deposit $300.

The single most important factor in any professional poker player’s career is their bankroll. Just like any start up business, without the proper funding, the business is doomed for failure. Many beginning players do not understand or realize that their bankrolls should be carefully and very conservatively managed, and not used as simply another bank account to spend as they please.

Managing Your Bankroll

Mathematically speaking, poker is not a game of chance. Professional poker players can, and do, track both their winnings, losses, expenses, and average amount of hands per session. For online players, there are even sophisticated tracking database programs that will keep track of all this information for them. Over time the randomness of poker will become much more predictable. Players know that over the long run, they can beat certain games and can expect to win X amount of bets over a certain number of hands. Now since poker is obviously not an absolute science, this information is only an average and is victim to what all players come to both love and hate. Variance.

Variance And Your Poker Bankroll

Variance is just like averaging a set of numbers. If you add a list of numbers together and then divide by how the amount of individual numbers there are in the list, you will get an average. Poker is the same way. Session 1 may net you +3 bets over 100 hands, but session 2 you lose 1 bet over 100 hands. You're still positive over the long run, regardless if you lost money on the 2nd session or not. Any result that is not statistically normal or average is simple, predictable variance.

Now in this scenario, lets say that you absolutely know you can beat $5/$10 fixed Texas Hold'em limit poker games for 2 bets for every 100 hands. All that means is that over a very large sample size, you consistently make $20 per 100 hands you play. But if you limit that sample size to just 1 or 2 sessions, the numbers may say something completely different. You could easily beat this game for 10-15 bets per 100 hands, or even lose the same amount. In the long run however, this small amount of hands is no indication whether or not you are beating this game. It has been proven that you need well over 20-30,000 hands to even begin to judge your current state of profitability with each game.

Now what does this all have to do with the size of your bankroll? This means that you are going to need a cushion for some of those inevitable losses you will experience. Since it is not uncommon to experience downswings of 200 bets (in limit games) and 10-15 buy ins (for no-limit games) you must make sure that not only do you have enough to cover these losses, you will need enough to still play in the same games you normally do, even if you are 200 bets down. The recommended minimal bankroll for any fixed limit game is 300 bets (I.E. $6 in a $3/$6 hold em game, so $1800.00 total in this case) This is a still quite risky, there are some players that recommend 6-700 bet bankrolls. Some professional players, that both live and play off their bankroll, opt to use 1000 bets or more. Ensuring that they will never have to move down in stakes or miss a mortgage payment during a downstreak. For no limit games, the average standard is 30-100 buy ins.

Once you your bankroll is oversaturated for your needs at a certain stake or game, then you can think about or take shots at moving up. Even if the poker sharks send you running back to the low limits, you will still have your healthy bankroll to help weather the storm.

Making sure that you never overplay your bankroll is important in your poker career. The main reason that players bust is because they are playing games that they are not properly bankrolled for. They will keep playing at a $50 table when they should only be playing at a $10 table even. Some players will lose money playing within their bankroll and then move up to a limit much higher than they should be at in hopes to make up for their loss.

These are a few things you should know about proper bankroll management when you start out playing real money poker and make your first poker deposit. As long as you stay true to what you are capable of doing with your bankroll you will never bust and will always have enough money to keep playing.

Breaking Even

There are a lot of times in your poker career that you will see you are not winning or losing money for a while. If a player is breaking even they instantly begin to fret about it. There is nothing wrong with breaking even. If you can manage to break even it means that you are winning, but just enough to cover the rake that is taken from you.

Players can go for a reasonable amount of time without moving up or down with their bankroll. Although the player is not winning money what is much more important is they are not losing money. There is a lot of experience and information that you can learn that comes with playing hands. All of these hands that are not affecting the player's bankroll are helping the player to become better, which is very important.

One thing with breaking even is that it doesn’t always mean you are not making money. If you are signed up for rakeback then you are raking all of those hands and you will get paid for them. Although you might not have won more money than you had to start with, you didn't lose any and now have some to add with it. Poker Deposit Bonuses work the same way in helping to increase your bankroll.

Upswinging

If a player is running hot and manages to make more money than average in a short amount of time this player is considered to be on an upswing. Upswings don’t have to be winning a lot of money. There are slow upswings as well in which the player just rarely loses in a session.

When you are on an upswing you should be playing as much as you can. Just because you are on an upswing doesn’t eliminate the fact that your hands can lose, but you will be playing with much more confidence. This extra boost of confidence will help you to win more money in the long run.

If you are on an upswing when you decide to move up in limits, make sure that you set an amount you are willing to lose before you move back down. An upswing can end at anytime and can even turn into a horrible downswing. Keep that in mind when moving up on an upswing.

Downswinging

Everyone who plays the game seriously knows what a downswing is and fears it greatly. A downswing can tear into you and force you to tilt off way more money than needed if you let it. A downswing is when a player takes a series of bad beats or losses for a decent amount of time.

One thing to remember when on a downswing is your bankroll management. If you ever swing down far enough that you no longer have 30 buy ins for the limit you are playing it is very important that you move down. If you continue to play even for a few buy ins longer and lose, you will have so much money needed to be won to even get back to where you were when the downswing started.

When on a downswing you have to make sure that you don't play if it is causing you to tilt. It is always correct to stop playing if you are not playing optimally. Losing money is hard on every player. If you notice that it is causing you to feel bad enough that you are constantly thinking about the money you have lost then you need to stop playing for the day and pick it back up where you left off the next time.

Preventing loss in every situation possible is key to surviving downswings. Your bankroll will always be up and down. The more you make it go up means the more money you are winning. The lower amount of money you lose when losing also means you are winning more money.