SplitSuit: 7 Key Poker Bankroll Management Tips

24 Oct 2024

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

In today's article, renowned mid-stakes player, coach, and author of educational materials James «SplitSuit» Sweeney will give you 7 useful tips on how to manage your bankroll effectively and efficiently. The article is designed for players of all ranks: from beginners and amateurs to aspiring professionals.

The rest of the text is in the words of James «SplitSuit» Sweeney.

Introduction

A bankroll is not just money for playing or virtual capital.

As in life, when you do not have a reserve of money for unforeseen circumstances and/or planned expenses, then you are constantly in the risk zone and do not feel very safe.

If you play poker to make money, you need a bankroll. It's simple. But how big a bankroll you need depends on a number of factors. Today we will talk about the most important of them.

So that we are on the same page, let's immediately define the concept of a bankroll.

At the same time, you do not mix these poker money with the usual cash flows in your normal life and do not consider BR as part of all your money while it lies on the balance in the poker room. If you have a different approach to managing money for poker, then I strongly recommend that you reconsider it:

• You should have money separately for life and separately for poker. Period.

If you are an amateur, then you do not need to bother with BR management. When poker is just entertainment for you, and you are ready to throw money into the cashier if necessary, then there are no problems. But it will be advisable to accustom yourself to managing a specific amount of money, isolated for poker, even in today's status.

And if you are a regular and earn money from poker, and do not intend to replenish the balance of the poker room with deposits, then you cannot do without a reliable bankroll - you must always be financially capable and morally ready to survive deep drawdowns from the inevitable negative manifestations of variance.

And now specific advice.

Tip #1: Keep a comfortable number of buy-ins in your bankroll

This number depends on 2 main conditions - how you play:

• Cash or tournaments
• As a regular or as an amateur

Let's look at them separately.

When you play non-professionally, but rather as an amateur, then as a rule, 20 buy-ins in the cashier will be enough for a cash game. For example, for the NL50 limit, this will be $1,000 on the balance.

• By the way, check out our new and simple calculators using the reliable bankroll calculator as an example.

If you prefer tournaments, but are still an amateur, then I recommend that you have 100 buy-ins on the balance. So, with an average buy-in to a tournament equal to $5, keep $500 in the cashier.

However, tournaments are divided into many types, formats, options + by the presence of add-ons and rebuys, etc. additional conditions. So, here's what's important to understand: if you're willing to regularly buy in/re-enter tournaments, then add the same amount to the buy-in price. That is, participating in a $5 tournament with 1 re-entry/addon will cost you a total of 5 + 5 = 10 dollars. Two «reloads» make the cost of 1 tournament not 5 dollars, but all 15. Then you should multiply this total amount that you're willing to spend on 1 tournament by 100.

And if you play any of these formats professionally and poker is your main source of income, then I would advise you to add one more zero to each of these numbers: 200 buy-ins for cash games and ... 1000 buy-ins for tournaments.

Playing poker professionally means conducting a very conservative bankroll management (hereinafter - BRM), where you reinsure yourself with a huge reserve from all sorts of troubles that can squander your game on fears and readiness to withdraw winnings for life. Again, the reason you need such a huge bankroll is because poker variance can be incredibly brutal, and there's nothing you can do about it except hedge your bets any way you can.

Chances are, unless you've been playing for a year or have played 3 million hands, you don't know what variance is capable of. Its negative swings can reach 100 BI even in cash games and last for months. Even for professional players. And for tournaments, multiply this figure by 3-4 times.

An exaggerated but very illustrative example

Let's imagine an absurd, but quite realistic option. You decided to immediately shoot at NL200 with $200 in your bankroll, rather than spend months moving up in limits: NL10 => 25 => 50 => 100 and finally => 200 ...

You waited a long time for your AA, your opponents folded several times and finally you were lucky enough to go All-In with them preflop. It would seem that you are about to double your stack and will continue to think about what to do with $400. But since chance decides almost everything in a given hand on the preflop, you can always lose this hand. Well, your opponent shows KK. You have an 82% chance of winning, and he has only 18. But on the river comes the third K, draining you emotionally and taking away all the money you had on your balance.

In 1/5 of the time, you will lose preflop even with aces. What can we say about if you decided to go all-in at NL200, having «only» QQ, when opponents could easily be dealt 12 combinations of even higher pairs? Or the notorious AK, which will beat your queens with a probability of ~ 50%?

And believe me, from my extensive experience: such unpleasant events can happen in series, and many times over a specific period of time / hands. Therefore, it is vital for you to be ready and able to withstand such failures without worsening and slowing down your game.

• There are no such things as too many buy-ins

20 buy-ins is only for a «C-grade». Where the edges between players are minimal, there are too many borderline (variance) situations where the hand must be continued - both in terms of EV (i.e. poker mathematics) and dynamics and other «human» things. Not necessarily by passively calling or necessarily going all-in, but in such situations the influence of randomness on the result is at its maximum level.

And you don't want this randomness to destroy your bankroll to zero or to draw you down unacceptably, which would lead to either a decrease in limits (while opponents will play at the same or even rise), or to a new deposit.

The purpose of a bankroll: to minimize the likelihood of ruin and help maintain emotional and financial readiness to play at the previous limit without deteriorating the quality of the game. And it is up to you to decide how to treat this.

Tip #2 (for amateurs): Determine your budget

If you play for fun, then you definitely have a main source of income, for example, a job. Then, having lost 2 buy-ins, you simply top up your balance and no problems.

But it is still much better to immediately determine the budget for playing poker. As I already said, it is always easier to immediately determine how much you are willing to spend on the game, based on your income, living expenses and everything else, than to deposit emotionally, lose everything and transfer money to the poker room again.

This is necessary so as not to suddenly discover that, it turns out, this week you have lost a quarter of your entire monthly income and half of your regular salary in poker. I would not want that.

This is especially true for those players who already clearly understand that today they are definitely losing money here, and not a winning poker player. At any distance beyond the short term, it is more profitable to be conservative than to risk money thoughtlessly.

Tip #3: Separate your money

• Money for poker and money for life should be stored and managed separately.

As for the poker bankroll, it is always useful to keep track of it and imagine its size (we will come back to this later), and also to understand whether it is growing, stagnant or even decreasing.

The same applies to life finances. I will say another obvious thing, but it is more useful to keep track of income and expenses, knowing all your affairs, than to be regularly surprised and upset because money suddenly became small.

The ideal option for keeping poker and life money separately is that you can physically keep them in different places. For example, in different bank accounts or on different sites - whatever. Just know where and how much you currently have.

It can be useful too: How Can I Stop Losing at Poker? | PTO Poker

And here we smoothly move on to the next tip.

Tip #4: Imagine you're out of bankroll

I know, it's hard to imagine this, but it's necessary. It's important to get a better sense of what it's like to be out of money to play.

• If you're playing a big tournament, imagine busting out.
• If you deposited into a poker room, imagine being banned or losing everything.
• If you're in a live game, imagine your stack of cash is gone. Completely.

My whole life, I've been taught to treat card games like going to the movies: I'll spend money for the fun and the experience, but I won't get a cent back. And I've never regretted it.

Even before the start of the session / a specific tournament, accept the defeat and in case of the current loss, look at the remainder as what you have in addition to zero - and this will greatly help you think positively. For example, you bought $ 200. - Immediately accept that you no longer have this money. - You mentally start the game with - $ 200. Let's say you ended up losing $ 150. So, treat the remainder of $ 50 as a win in addition to the loss of everything. - And it could have been much worse.

• Why bother with this exercise and mindset?

Firstly,

And secondly, it helps to understand what limit you absolutely should not play above, both to play well and to avoid playing too much and losing your entire bankroll.

Remember that even winning players lose a decent share of their sessions: from 30 to 45%, depending on their opponents and variance. If you are not ready to tolerate such a share of negative sessions, with all the emotional pain they bring, do not play poker now.

• Poker is not a solution to your money problems, but a promising bonus to an already normal situation.

If you start playing poker to try to win money that you desperately need in life, you will almost 100% lose the last one. Once you have built up a solid bankroll, you should almost not care about poker for money any more.

However,

Tip #5: Monitor your bankroll constantly

I know that you have heard and read many times advice like «Check your bankroll as rarely as possible, so as not to be obsessed with current results in a business where there are always swings in a short sample and not to worsen the game because of it.» So many people, so many opinions. And sometimes these opinions change.

I strongly recommend that you responsibly monitor the state of your bankroll:

• What is your bankroll today?
• What has happened to it recently?
• What are your successes in different places, etc.?

Different places can be not only individual poker disciplines and types, but even different poker rooms. Yes, the bankroll is allocated for poker in general - wherever it may be - and not necessarily for playing in a specific room.

The more you play, the more useful it is to have clear data on the state of your poker safety cushion. And if you play professionally and pay taxes, then specific reports become simply necessary.

The table you use to monitor your bankroll doesn't have to be particularly complex and account for every cent's movement during a gaming session. A few basic items will suffice:

• Poker room,
• How long you played,
• Total profit and
• Total loss.

Breaking down your bankroll by month, week and individual dates is not prohibited, but I would limit myself to weeks.

It is best to start an Excel spreadsheet where you will form, record and calculate everything almost manually, but there are also mobile apps like PokerStack that help you keep track of your finances when playing poker.

Or you can get by with regular poker trackers that have a function for monitoring your income and expenses. But getting into the habit of monitoring your bankroll on your own will only benefit you - and not only in poker.

Tip #6: Use stop-losses

A stop-loss is a limitation of losses in a single session.

This is when, even before its start, you stipulate the parameters of quitting in advance, where the stop-loss characterizes the purely monetary side, without taking into account the emotional background and so on. That is, you decided that with a loss of -5 buy-ins you will immediately exit for this day, then you physically press the buttons to exit the game. 

Obviously, it is better to limit yourself to losing only 3 NL5 buy-ins, for example, than to climb to some upper limit to recoup and ultimately see a loss of a whole fifty, or even a hundred dollars, which made up almost your entire «bankroll».

If you are a beginner / you lack discipline

The more problems you have with tilt and self-control, the more important and strict stop-losses become. Then, if you easily lose control, then before the session you should set yourself up like «If I lose 3 buy-ins, then I usually start doing crazy things soon, which means, most likely, I will lose a lot more money. So, I immediately stop playing for today.»

• And then you do it manually: click on the sitout / cross at the top of the table and close the room.

For beginners in online, this may not seem so easy, but it is easier than it seems.

But for live players, it is much easier: you can simply not bring more than you are ready to lose. Leave your card somewhere outside and do not become an ATM for opponents - they are just waiting for this. Lost all the cash you brought? - So you've had your fun for today. It wasn't your day.

Check this out: Phil Galfond: Top 5 signs it's time to quit your poker session

You are a serious player

This means that you have normal emotions, discipline and self-control.

For disciplined players, I do not recommend resorting to stop-losses.

When you have a huge edge over the players at a particular table, then leaving it will be a greater evil than «saving» by losing only 3 buy-ins. When you think clearly, soberly perceive what is happening outside and inside you - in a word, you are not on tilt - then continue playing as if nothing happened.

Lost 3 buy-ins? - And at this table in the current session lies a potential +10 buy-ins. You just need to wait for a situation when you can get them.

• If you continue to play A-game, then forget about stop loss and play on. This is the maximum EV. 

Tip #7: Regularly try to play at higher limits

That is, shoot the next limit.

So, let's assume that you are not yet a professional player, but are just getting used to the current limit, not only getting your lumps here, but also building up a bankroll with a plan to move up in limits further.

• We'll talk about cash here, but in tournaments the approach to shots will be similar: allocate a number of buy-ins for a shot.

Is your current limit NL10? - Try to shoot NL20-25-30. Believe me, the game at neighboring limits is not the same - between two limits there are differences not only in the buy-in price, but also in the composition of the players, their characteristics and manners. Between some limits and on some poker platforms the differences are more significant, and between others - less.

So, your bankroll has more than 20 buy-ins of the already familiar limit. Since you are not a professional, but already know how to win at poker, then I recommend that you regularly allocate money to try to foothold at the next limit. It is not necessary to win all 20 stacks of the new limit at your current limit - try playing at it now.

Factors Affecting the Choice of BRM

So. Over the last 50 thousand hands, you have been steadily winning, your bankroll is growing, and with it, expectations, uncertainty and, most importantly, fears that many things will go wrong. The most common question that regulars ask sounds something like this: «How many buy-ins will I need to shoot?»

Both figures refer to different limits:

• 20 buy-ins as the base bankroll of the current limit and
• 2 buy-ins of the new limit to try to gain a foothold at the target limit.

A competent choice, management and correction of bankroll management determines how soon you will allow yourself to shoot at the next limit, how long it will take you to climb from the start to the intended final limit (if there is one), and most importantly - whether you will be happy with your choice - to earn money with poker.

• The sooner you get used to it and understand it, the faster you will learn to win there.

This article was written from the Poker BANKROLL Management 101 (BRM Tips) video by Vladimir ABIVPlus.