My sister was always the one who was careful with her money when we were growing up. She was the one who had an ever-growing savings account balance while I had pocketfuls of discarded sweet wrappers and more magazines under my bed than WH Smiths had on their shelves.
I have to admit to having endured some serious money issues during my early 20s, but that all changed when I discovered poker and poker bankroll management in particular. Despite having been frivolous with money in my past, I can say with great pride that I have never gone broke , even if I have suffered some horrific downswings in my time.
The main reason for me never busting in poker is that I follow strict bankroll management, possibly too strict if I think about it, yet it is a practice that every poker players from $0.01/$0.02 stakes up to $10,000 buy-in tournaments should follow. Many don’t, but they should.
What is poker bankroll management?
As the name suggests, bankroll management is the management of your bankroll; this is the amount of money you have available to play poker. It is money that you are prepared to lose, that is not needed for any other expense in your life.
If you think that you have a $1,000 bankroll but you need $600 of that to pay for little Johnny’s school skiing trip next month you have a $400 bankroll. Be honest with yourself, never gamble with money that you cannot afford to lose. Even the most elite poker players in the world go on long losing stretches, yet these players can still play their usual stakes because they have built a financial cushion to help soften the blow. They follow bankroll management.
To wrap up what bankroll management is in a sentence or two, I would say bankroll management is allowing the money you have available for poker dictate the stakes you play for and not the other way around.
Why is poker bankroll management so important?
I’ve already mentioned that even the best poker players on the planet can go on long losing stretches, sometimes tens of thousands of cash game hands or hundreds of tournaments. A few years ago, I was playing a lot of 180-man turbo tournaments where I was a long-term winning player. While I was never going to get rich from them, I was making money playing them until one day no matter what I did was wrong. I couldn’t win to save my life. A long story made short; I went on a downswing that spanned 1,200 games and cost me around 150 buy-ins.
It stung, yet I was able to continue playing because I am a bankroll nit and had a large enough poker bankroll behind me to allow me to continue playing. The downswing turned around eventually, and I resumed the slow and often painful task of rebuilding my decimated bankroll.
Another reason for having a decent bankroll behind you is that it allows you to play your A-game with more ease. Having a $50 bankroll and playing in a $0.25/$0.50 game where you buy in for $50 means you have one shot and one shot only. Inevitably, you’ll play a more timid style of poker where you don’t take lines that yield the most value because you’ll be scared of losing. Then you get , get your stack in versus and lose your entire bankroll when a lands on the river, taking you out of the game. Having several buy-ins behind you would allow you to keep playing, absorb those inevitable losses and try to win your money back.
How big should your poker bankroll be?
The answer to this question, like many in poker, is it depends. Everyone is different, which is why this great game of ours is exactly that, great. When deciding what size your bankroll should be, make the following considerations:
Are you willing to move down in stakes if you hit a significant losing stretch?
Do you want to take a more risky approach to try and move up in stakes faster?
If you somehow lost all of your bankroll would you be able to afford to replenish it?
Does your game and format of choice have high variance?
Some games have more variance than others and, therefore, require a larger bankroll. Six-Max Pot Limit Omaha, for example, needs a larger bankroll than full-ring no limit Hold’em due to the nature of the game.
I’ve created a table below for some cash games and tournaments – the games I play mostly – as a guide to what a poker bankroll’s size should be. The information is a mixture of data found in books, poker forums and training videos I’ve seen over the years, plus some of my recommendations.
For cash games, buy-ins refer to the maximum you can buy into a game. If the stakes are $0.25/$0.50, and you can buy in for $50, then one buy-in is $50. For tournaments, if a tournament costs $11 ($10+$1) then $11 is one buy-in.
Game
Minimum
Medium
Cautious
No limit Hold’em 6-Max cash games
30 buy-ins
50 buy-ins
100 buy-ins
No limit Hold’em Full Ring cash games
25
40
75
Pot limit Omaha 6-Max cash games
50
100
150
Pot limit Omaha Full Ring cash games
30
50
100
No limit Hold’em Full Ring SNG
30
50
100
No limit Hold’em Multi-Table Tournaments
100
200
500
No limit Hold’em Multi-table Tournamenrs (2K+ players)
200
400
600
For multi-table tournaments, I follow a system that works on an average buy-in system. Say my bankroll at the time is $1,000, according to the table I should only play tournaments with a maximum buy-in of $10. However, I’ll sometimes play a $50 buy-in but then offset the difference by playing a few $1, $2 or $5 tournaments. When calculated at the end of the week or month (total cost of buy-ins divided by the number of tournaments played) my average buy-in will fit into my bankroll constraints as snug as a dog in front of the fire on Christmas morning.The numbers may seem excessively large if you’re not used to following bankroll management or have run so well in the early stage of your career that you’ve never seen a downswing – lucky you! – but I fall somewhere in the middle of Minimum and Medium and have never gone broke.
Play around with the figures, look at your personal circumstances and come up with a figure that suits you. I play better knowing I have a large bankroll behind me; you may play better if the risk of going broke increases. Feel free to share your bankroll recommendations in the comments box below or via our social media channels.
Bankroll management is a vastly underrated poker skill but is one of the most valuable around as without a bankroll you’re out of the game. Often you’ll see one size fits all advice telling you that you need ‘x’ amount of buy-ins. That’s good as a baseline but I believe you should tailor your bankroll to your own requirements and what games you play.
So here’s the baseline numbers, for tournaments you should have at least 100 times your average buy-in. For cash games you should aim to have 50 times the buy-in so at NL5 you need $250 to comfortably play it and for sit and gos it really depends on what type you play but for nine man and six man sit and gos a bank of 65 buy-ins is a good starting point.
But, all those numbers are starting points and should be adjusted upwards or downwards based on a these five factors:
1.) Ability to replenish bankroll
Are you a pro? A casual player or somewhere inbetween? Basically how much do you need to rely on your poker income for a living and how easy it is to replenish your bankroll through other income? If you’re in the former camp then you need to protect your bankroll and have nittier bankroll considerations. Whilst if you can replenish your bankroll easily you can take more risks.
2.) Field size
The bigger the field in tournaments the higher the variance. If you’re constantly having to battle through thousands of players for a shot at the final table – where the big money is – you’ll need a bigger bankroll.
3.) Speed
If you’re playing mostly turbo tournaments or sit and gos then you again will need to adjust your bankroll requirements up from the baseline number.
4.) Type of game
If you’re playing heads-up pot-limit Omaha cash games the swings will be far higher than if you play full-ring limit hold’em. You need a far bigger bankroll for pot-limit Omaha, which plays roughly twice as big as no-limit Hold’em. You’ll need more buy-ins for six-max cash than for full-ring too.
5.) Your playing style
Are you a loose fast playing risk taking type of player, or a careful methodical player who’s adverse to risk taking? If it’s the former you’ll find yourself in far more high variance spots and need more money to ride out the inevitable variance.
Your poker bankroll is the money you have in your poker account. How you manage your bankroll will have a significant impact on how well you financially survive streaks of bad luck or bad play, but it also affects how well you manage to keep the right focus in order to play at your best.
It’s easy to find guidelines online on how you should manage your bankroll in order to avoid going bust. Although this is crucial and something I’ll cover in this article, I think that not enough emphasis is being put on some other key techniques for keeping your focus where it should be.
The goals of having good bankroll management are:
Maintaining a healthy bankroll during streaks of bad luck or bad play
Allowing yourself to focus solely on playing at your best and getting better
First let’s cover the technical guidelines for how to manage your bankroll:
Bankroll Minimum Limits
Poker Variant
Number of Buy-Ins
Cash Games
50 buy-ins
Multi-Table Tournaments
150 buy-in
Sit and Go Tournaments
100 buy-ins
Double or Nothing Tournaments
50 buy-ins
Heads Up Tournaments
50 buy-ins
18-man Tournaments
90 buy-ins
45-man Tournaments
100 buy-ins
“Taking shots”
Once you are starting to reach the next minimum level, say for example your have been playing 25NL cash games starting with a bankroll of 50 buy-ins ($1,250) and your bankroll has just reached 50 buy-ins for the next level which is 50NL ($2,500).
At this time you can either stay on 25NL until you have a small buffer for the next level, like around 55 buy-ins. This will allow you to play at least one session on that level knowing you can lose 5 buy-ins without having to worry about stepping back down. Alternatively you can do what’s often referred to as “taking a shot” at the next level.
The main purpose of this approach is to tell yourself; “alright, I will play one session on this level but if I lose more than X amount of buy-ins I will step back down”. So even if you start playing on the next level at the bare minimum required on your bankroll you have a plan for when it’s time to step back down.
Alright, now let’s take a look at what techniques you can use to allow yourself to stay on top of your game at all times:
The Key Ingredients
Keeping as much focus on how well your play instead of worrying about results is a lot easier than it sounds. Results does matter, there is no point trying to get away from that truth. But the best way to get good results is to play at your best and keep getting better. So if you are constantly worrying about the state of your bankroll, checking your results for the session you are currently playing at, do you think this is helping you play better in any way?
In almost every case, the answer is no.
If this is true to you then you need a bankroll management strategy which takes there worries away. Here are some good rules to use:
Be Honest
Before you decide which limits you want to use for your bankroll management try to be as honest as possible with yourself. Maybe you are playing cash games within the bankroll requirements I’ve mentioned above, yet the results are affecting your mood which means you are playing a bit tilted. In that case it might be a good idea to implement an even less aggressive strategy and perhaps step down a limit.
Don’t look at results until after the session. This is a good rule which might need some practise. It’s a behaviour often used to seek confirmation due to lack of confidence and/or used as a reward system; “yes I won a big pot, let’s see how nice my bankroll looks right now!”.
This kind of mindset will quickly take focus away from your play and make you worry a lot more about keeping your bankroll looking nice than playing your best. Remember, results does matter but the best way to get good results is through good play.
Handling a downswing
The most difficult time to implement your bankroll strategy is when going through a downswing. You will often suffer a lack of confidence as well as patience. This will make it even more difficult to keep a good focus but if you combine your bankroll strategy with playing fewer tables as well as shorter sessions you will make it easier for yourself to quickly build momentum again.
Fewer tables means that you will force yourself to keep a good focus on your play while the shorter sessions means that you quite easily can build momentum. If you for example play four short winning sessions you will start to get your confidence back and build momentum.
Handling an upswing
This is one of the most underrated challenges of a recreational player. Winning will affect you just as much, if not more than losing. Mistakes can be to play too high, too many tables or falling in love with your pretty bankroll and set yourself up for instant tilt as soon as you start losing. Make sure you stick to your “rules”, focus and bankroll management even when things are going great. Remember what got you success in the first place.
Whilst it’s true that a small pre-flop mistake can often lead to larger more costlier post-flop mistakes, there’s no denying that post-flop play, with up to three streets to negotiate, is more complex and trickier to master than pre-flop play. With that in mind here’s five common post-flop mistakes that happen all the time at low stakes.
1. Always firing a continuation bet
Just because you’re the pre-flop raiser it doesn’t mean you have to always bet the flop. Not only will players cotton on if you do, but simple maths means it’s impossible for you to have connected every time. However, it’s important to have balance when checking the flop, you need to check both when you’ve missed, when you’ve hit and on those scary boards too when you have air and when you have a draw.
2. Only leading into the pre-flop raiser with marginal hands
If you only ever lead into the pre-flop raiser with marginal hands like second pair – say 8-7 on a Q-7-3 flop – you’ll be incredibly easy to read. Leading into the pre-flop raiser is fine, just make sure you do it with strong hands like sets, semi-bluffs like flush draws, to represent hands that could’ve hit your pre-flop calling range and with your marginal hands and bluffs too.
3. Calling one street and then calling the next regardless when a blank card comes
This is a pretty bad one because it’s easy to file it away in the ‘what else could I do’ section. If you call a raise on the turn thinking you’re good, a blank cards comes on the river and your opponent bets again, the right mentality is not to just call because you called the turn and the river hasn’t changed anything. You now have one more street of information to go on. Don’t just blindly click call.
4. Not having a plan
The flop, turn and river are not independent streets, they’re connected. You need to plan all three post-flop streets on the flop. It can be as simple as, ‘I have a really strong hand, I want to get three streets of value and be all-in on the river, how much do I need to bet on the flop to do that?’ To the quite complicated – “What do I do if he raises the flop, what do I do if the flush comes on the turn? Which turn cards are good/bad/neutral for me?
5. Changing your bet size based on hand strength
It is absolutely fine to change your bet size on the flop/turn/river but it should rarely be done based on the strength of your hand. What you should change it on is the texture of the board. For instance if you have A-K and the flop comes K-7-2 rainbow you can bet smaller than if it comes K-10-9 with two hearts. On the second board you need to charge draws more to continue, on the first board, well there are no draws. And on the first board you want the marginal hands like small pairs, weak sevens and so on to call you so you bet less to accomplish this.
, get your stack in versus 
and lose your entire bankroll when a 
lands on the river, taking you out of the game. Having several buy-ins behind you would allow you to keep playing, absorb those inevitable losses and try to win your money back.
