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Play Smart - Manage your bankroll

What is a Bankroll?

This seems like an elementary question at best, but I talk to numerous players every day who just don’t seem to understand exactly what constitutes a bankroll. If you’re going to play poker with any degree of seriousness, your bankroll should be your key concern at all times. A good starting point to nurturing and taking care of it is knowing what it is.

Your bankroll is made up of any money you have set aside for poker and nothing else. The money doesn’t necessarily need to be in your poker account- it can be in your bank account, ready to transfer online, or on your credit card. Remember though, any money you include in your bankroll that will affect other areas of your life if lost (e.g., rent money, food money) should not be there!

Even if the extra cash does give your perceived bankroll a nice padding, you will constantly be playing scared money. It is not fun to be constantly worried about how you will pay for your life if you somehow lose money you couldn’t afford to spend. Bankroll management is as much mental as it is a hard skill. It is impossible to play solid, winning poker on scared money. Only play with what you can afford to lose!

Why manage:

Simply put, you won’t like going broke. And you will go broke if you play with no bankroll management. As glorious as the “turned $50 into $10,000 in one day” stories sound, they are ridiculous. Half of them are made up stories, and the ones that aren’t fabricated are written by extremely lucky people who took shots well beyond their means.

Of every thousand people that try to run their money up playing in games they can’t afford, maybe one or two will succeed. A lot of the time, once they hit their big score, they’ll go broke anyways due to lack of money management at higher stakes. This is not the career you want!

Poker is a a game of skill, but chance is a big part of it. You can use probability and math to gamble profitably, but let’s face it- bad luck happens! You will experience incredibly long stretches of break-even or losing play in your career, even when you’re playing your A game.

Downswings are variance at work, and variance is a very real part of poker. By managing your bankroll properly, you can survive these stretches without financial or mental trauma, and bounce right back into the heaters you’ll be due for!

How do you manage:

How you manage your money is determined by the type of games you play, and your comfort level. Below is a chart showing some general guidelines for all sorts of games.

The starting buyins column illustrates how many full game buy-ins you should have in your bankroll before attempting a level. The drop down at column illustrates the point at which you should consider dropping down a stake level in order to rebuild your roll.

Type of Game                     Starting Buyins        Drop Down At
Cash (NL)                            30 Full Buyins            20 Full Buyins
Cash (Limit)                        300 Big Bet               150 Big Bets
Tournaments (Sit n Go)        40 Full Buyins            25 Full Buyins
Tournaments (Multi-Table)   100 Full Buyins          80 Full Buyins

Of course, it’s not always as simple as following the chart. Feel free to take shots at a higher stake if you feel you are crushing your current limit. Your skill level might be far superior to that of your opponents, and it could be +EV for you to move up.

Just remember to drop right back down if you start to lose. Another thing to consider is the structure of the games you play. I told you in previous articles that shorthanded games are higher variance than full-ring games. You might want to consider padding your bankroll with a few extra buyins because of this if you play 6-max or heads up.

Why this is one of the most important articles you’ll ever read:

As a poker player, the tools of your trade are your brains and your money. You need card skill to beat your opponents at the tables, and money management skill to keep your bankroll afloat. Stories of great players going bust due to shot taking and poor financial choices are unbelievably common, and unfortunate.

It’s always a shame to see promising up and comers go broke due to failure to account for variance, or failure to play within their means. In theory, bankroll management should be significantly easier to learn and apply than the skills it takes to actually beat the game of poker. So why is it that so many one-time professionals can’t seem to grasp the concept?

It all boils down to mental strength. You’ve read articles on this site stressing the importance of your mental game. It’s a serious matter. Most people who start out in poker do not have the patience or mindset to win consistently and over the long term.

Part of your mental game is playing within your bankroll at all times- no crazy shot taking, no playing under the influence of drugs or alcohol (believe the hype- this is a bankroll killer), adjusting your bankroll to high and low variance games. Practice sound bankroll management at all times, and set yourself up for a steady ascension into poker profitability.