A look at poker bankrolls

It assumes even greater importance if this is the only money that you will ever put into the venture of playing poker. So to give poker your best shot and to minimise the chances of going broke then you need to be professional with your bankroll. This obviously means breaking your bankroll down into acceptable units so as to minimise the risk of losing it all and to ride the variance that is within the game!

So if your pocket aces get cracked by pocket kings and you lose your money then that money represents only a very tiny percentage of your overall bankroll and your skill will have the greatest possible chance to show itself. But that brings me onto another point because “skill” is subjective and has many complex variables attached to do it. Your poker ability, knowledge, skill or call it whatever you want is directly responsible for the level of variance that you have in the game.

So the worse that you play then the greater the swings will be in your bankroll. But also the skill level of your opponents will also have an impact as well. So what lessons can we derive from this? Well firstly your earn rate will take an awful long time to reveal itself. I have known players have totally different earn rates over separate sample sizes of 100,000 hands. I have heard of players having great win rates over 100k hands and then breaking even over the next 100k hands.

While it is a mistake to think that these statistics apply to everyone, they also cannot possibly be ignored and so represent part of the spectrum of events that are possible for a player. But there are many factors that influence your bankroll swings and always playing at the same limit is another such factor. If you have 20 buy-ins at NL50 but then choose to play NL100 with the same money then you no longer have the same safety net against the swings and variance.

So we always need to assume that you play at the same level when contemplating bankroll sizes. But trust me when I say that there are no firm guidelines that can be adhered to because of all of the complex variables just mentioned. So only rough general guidelines can be offered even though this is something that I do not like to do as generalities are something that I don’t like in poker.

If you are a proven winning player with a sample size of at least 50k hands and an earn rate of at least 3bb/100 then you should be fine with at least 20 buy-ins at the lower levels in no-limit play without getting too deep into the vagaries of bankroll requirements. But do not be too quick to listen to other players bankroll swings and sizes as nearly all of what you read and here will mostly not be relevant to you.

Tags:poker bankrolls