Online Poker Bankroll Management
Beginning players who want to know the bankroll management required to play a certain stake should first be sure that they are a winner at that stake. If they don’t know this, they should start at the bottom, in order to develop their skills and make sure they have an edge, as no bankroll is large enough to sustain a losing player indefinitely. Once they know what stake they’re starting at, they need to decide their goal for playing. There are two possible goals, as well as points in between them. These are to maximize the expected growth rate of the bankroll, or can involve selecting a win rate, variance, and tolerable risk of going bust and seeing what bankroll is required for that. This is why bankroll management for poker is so important
Beginners are often given numeric buy-in requirements to play a certain stake. For online poker cash games, these can range from 20 buy-ins to over 100 buy-ins. For online poker tournaments and SNGs, the numbers given generally start at 100 buy-ins, and can hit as high as 500 buy-ins. However, these numbers are somewhat arbitrary, based solely on the experiences of players who will have different skill and swings from you. You can follow them, and if you stick with the conservative side and have an edge you will probably make money and not go bust, but these rules may not be optimal depending on your goals.
So, how do you choose a bankroll number?
The bankroll you need depends on several things: your win rate, your variance or how swingy of a game you play, and what risk of ruin or at least risk of having to move down you can tolerate. As your win rate rises, your bankroll requirements decrease, while as your variance rises, you need a larger bankroll. There are some very good calculators available if you search for poker risk of ruin calculators to see what bankroll is required given different win rates, variance, and risk tolerance. For instance, say we are a decent, nitty full ring player, and we can tolerate a 1% risk of ruin, have a win rate of 3bb/100, and a standard deviation, which is a measure of variance, of 75bb/100, then we need 43 buy-ins. On the other hand, if our win rate rises to 6bb/100, with the same standard deviation and risk tolerance we only need 22 buy-ins.
For SNG’s and in particular large tournaments, it becomes more difficult to measure both your edge and your variance, and so the experiential guidelines gain more value. Generally, the smaller the field, the lower the variance. Good players of some higher variance game types, such as 180-man SNG’s, report 100 buy-in downswings regularly, so obviously several hundred buy-ins are required.
The calculations for cash games are imperfect, as we never know our true win rate or variance, and also comfort comes into play, as under some bankrolls we will play better than others. For instance, when over-rolled, some players tend to play their best, while others feel that it becomes ok to spew chips off. The ideal bankroll management strategy is really where the math doesn’t say it is bad, it’s within the bounds of what experienced players consider reasonable, and it’s at a level that one plays their best poker at, with the right balance between fear and recklessness.
* If you are new to poker and want to improve your poker game, check out The Poker Blueprint, the best-selling poker book on Amazon.com.
