Bankroll management is possibly the most important concept you will ever learn if you want to play poker regularly. Here at PokerHarder UK we strongly encourage you to learn about bankroll management as soon as possible if you want to be a profitable poker player.
Bankroll management involves setting yourself strict guidelines on how much of the money in your poker accounts you can use at any one time, regardless of what type of game you’re playing. In poker, as in most other sports or games there is undeniably an element of luck. Yes poker is a game of skill but it is the element of luck that is the reason it is so important to learn good bank roll management.
Even the most successful poker players in the world have times when they lose big pots even when they played it perfectly and were favourite to win the hand. On top of that the law of odds means that at some point every poker player will have a bad streak where he might have days or even weeks without winning or making any money from a poker game. But, there is something that can be done about these ‘swings’ and that is to play within the limits of your bankroll so that you don’t lose it all.
Bankroll management does is different for cash games and tournaments. If for example you’re playing sit & go’s it’s best to make sure you have a minimum of 40 buy-ins in your poker account. This is higher than for cash games because there is a higher variance in tournaments because of the increasing blind levels. A lot of times sit & go’s will only pay out the top three places and it isn’t unlikely that a player will have periods where they don’t make the money in 10-20 of these tourneys. Multi table tournaments have an even higher variance as there are even more players to beat so the bigger the luck factor you will have to ride out. For MTT’s we suggest that you should only enter tournaments when you have a minimum of 100 buy in’s in your poker bankroll.
Cash games however are different, when you’re playing a no-limit cash game the widely used rule is t have 20 buy-ins for the limits in which you’re playing. If you’re playing a no-limit game with stakes of $0.01/$0.02 a general buy in for this kind of table would be $2 (100 times the big blind), so if you wanted to play these tables you should have at least $40 in your bankroll. When you have increased your bankroll to $100 you can move up to the $0.02/$0.05 tables. But if you start losing in these next limits you must be able to find the discipline to go back down to the lower stakes as soon as you go under 15 table buy-ins. (that is $75 using this example).
So remember if you want to become a winning player; discipline is essential in poker and especially so when it comes to managing your own bankroll.