Managing your poker bankroll

A lot has been written about the art of bankroll management. Even the best poker player can go broke with bad or inadequate management of their roll. This is of course especially important for professional poker players who would be effectively out of a job if they lost their entire cash reserves.

The number put forward for proper use of your bankroll and usually aimed at the more professional player or the player that aspires to be professional. And while the advice is usually good and sound for every player the numbers involved can be very off-putting for the more casual player.

Being told that you should have a bankroll of between two hundred dollars and five hundred dollars in order to sit into a ten dollar cash game can seem quite out of proportion.

And again, while those numbers are technically accurate, for the more casual player that has a source of income other than from online gambling, and can count on some of that income for funding their online poker game, then there is a different approach that should work just as well.

For this example we will assume that you have $50 set aside from your wage every week to play poker with, and that the world will not end nor your kids go hungry if you lose it all.

Next thing you need to do is work out how many sessions of poker you will play in the week, or in the period until you will next have some spendable money in the bank. Say you will play five sessions of poker in any given week. Simply take your bankroll amount of $50 and divide it by the number of sessions, in this case 5, and you have your nightly allowance figure of ten dollars.

Split that in two, and you can buy into a cash game for a maximum of $5. If you bust out of that game, you still have $5 to find a more suitable table and finish the night out. If you lose that second $5 amount then you quit for the night.

It will take some control to leave the tables when you still have $40 in your account but that is what bankroll management for the casual poker player involves. If you do lose your first nights stake, you can come back the second night and play at the same stakes again, because you will still have a $40 bankroll for the remaining 4 session of the week. If on the other hand you double up your first night stake, then you will have a bankroll of $60 for the remaining 4 sessions, so you can start the next night with $15.