Bankroll Management Strategy
As a poker player you can’t be good at just playing poker or else you’ll eventually run into problems. Sure, you’ll need to be able to be a winning poker player to have long-term success, but at the same time you need to have some other attributes. One of the other attributes that you need as a poker player is the ability to manage your money or bankroll properly to ensure long-term success.
Whether you have a bankroll of a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars you need to manage it. If you don’t manage your money while playing poker then you’ll end up running out of money in most cases. When you start losing money it’s almost automatic for most people to want to chase the losses and get it back as soon as possible. The reality is that you will lose more in most cases if you chase your losses. It’s important to set some win and loss thresholds so that once you hit the threshold you can stop playing.
If you have $500 in your bankroll and you’re a cash game player you won’t get very far by playing $1/$2. You might get lucky and win some money initially, but eventually you’ll most likely lose your entire bankroll. If you’re playing cash games with $500 you need to start playing on the micro limit tables until you can build up a more sizeable roll. A big part of poker is variance and your bankroll needs to be able to handle the variance you’ll experience in cash games. It’s really easy to lose 5 buy-ins before getting on a hot streak and winning 10 buy-ins. If you only have 3 buy-ins in your bankroll because you’re playing at limits that are to big for your roll then you’ll end up losing your money before winning any a lot of the time.
For those of you that play in tournaments it’s really simple to manage your money. All you need to do is decide how many buy-ins you should have in your bankroll. Everyone suggests a different amount and it’s hard to find people in agreement on how many buy-ins you should have, but you should make sure you have at least 20-30 buy-ins. This means that if you have a $300 bankroll you should play the $10+$1 tournaments until you can build up a bigger bankroll.
It isn’t that difficult to make sure you don’t lose all your money while playing poker, but if you don’t keep it in mind you can easily make some big mistakes. When you aren’t having a good day playing poker the best thing to do is leave the poker room for the day and go back the next day. If you don’t you can easily tilt away your bankroll which will mean less time spent playing poker. It would always be nice to win every session you play so you never need to worry about your bankroll, but this isn’t the case for 99% of poker players.
