Playing within Your Bankroll
Most any professional online poker player who worked his way up from grinding low limit tables to playing the biggest high stakes poker games in the world would probably agree that bankroll management is one of the clearest keys to success in cash and tournament poker. If you aren’t playing in your poker league, where you have enough buy ins to last through sprees of bad luck and cold spells, you are pretty much setting yourself up in the long run to go broke.
So how much do you need to fund a good roll? Well, it all depends on where you start. When I first started playing cards, I would just sit down at the $1/$2 no limit tables with money straight out of my bank account, where in my mind I wanted to win, but in the end it didn’t really matter, because it was just ‘poker money.’ It took a while before I realized that playing at that level, with those kind of swings, on the money I had, I would run out of poker funds if I hit any kind of bad slump, which no matter how good of a player you are, can last for months or even years.
Math analysts for poker will tell you that if you are buying in with more than 1-2% of your stack for a tournament, and maybe up to 5% in a cash game, you are putting too much on the line at once. You need a good 50-60 buy ins for the long haul, for those spells where you can’t seem to make the money no matter how well you play. Your aces keep getting cracked, guys are hitting two outers; it could go on forever. But if you are equipped with enough buy ins to keep coming back, in the long run, skill wins over luck, so make sure that you are setting yourself up for the right odds to win, and play within your bankroll.
