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If you are a regular poker player, it is important that you look after your poker finances well. If you can manage to keep control of the money that you dedicate to poker, it should be easier to calculate your wins from your losses, and find out if you are winning money in the long run. Furthermore, managing your money well also involves exercising good ‘bankroll management’ so that you can help prevent yourself from losing your entire bankroll.
Bankroll management simply involves playing at certain limits depending on how much money you have available, to help prevent yourself from going bust at the tables. If you play at too high a limit with not enough money, then it is very likely that you will lose all your poker funds in a very short period of time. On the flip side, if you play at too low a level with a big bankroll, then you are not giving yourself the best opportunity to make money from the game. This is where the rules of bankroll management come into play.
If you are a cash game player, it is advised that you only ever put 5% of your total bankroll on the table at most at any one time. The online poker rooms will usually have games where the maximum buy in for each limit in no limit and pot limit games is one hundred times the size of the big blind. Therefore if you wish to play the $1/$2 no limit game and you intend to sit down with the maximum buy in of $200, you should have at least $4000 in your total bankroll.
Similarly, if you are a tournament player and like to play in the popular Sit ‘n’ Go games on offer, you should have 40 buy-ins for the level of tournament you wish to play at. Therefore if you have a bankroll of $800, you can comfortably play in the $20 Sit ‘n’ Go tournaments without the fear of going broke.
These rules may seem a little harsh and appear to confine you to quite low limits, but it is in your best interest as a poker player to adhere to them. It is not uncommon to go through long stretches of bad runs of cards, which you can do nothing about due to the fact that it is impossible to control what cards will come out of the deck on any given hand. During these bad runs it is likely that you will lose a substantial amount of money no matter how well you are playing, which is why it is important to have a big enough bankroll to absorb these losses.
If you exercise good bankroll management, you are giving yourself the best opportunity to make money from the game. If you continue to play well, there is a good chance that you will be making enough money to move up to the next limit. By continuing this process, you will rise up through the limits and be able to make a sizeable income from poker over time. But remember, this process will take time, so be careful not to rush it or you will be setting yourself up for a fall.
Based on Texas Holdem Strategy found at ThePokerBank
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