Poker Strategy

Good Bankroll Management

One of the most difficult parts of playing good poker has nothing to do with the cards you’re dealt. No matter how good you are at playing poker, if you’re not good at managing your money you’ll eventually run into trouble at the tables. Great poker players “go bust” each and every day, losing their entire bankrolls, and more often than not it’s because of their poor money management skills, not because of their card-playing skills.

Poker players call the money they have available to play with their “bankroll”, and how they manage their bankroll has a lot to do with whether they’re winning or losing players. While you might think it’s as simple as “Don’t lose all your money”, good bankroll management is actually a bit more complicated than that.

The most important consideration is to be sure that you’re playing the correct stakes for your bankroll. If you only have $100, you shouldn’t be playing at a table with blinds of $10/$20. You have no room for error and playing just one or two losing hands can wipe you out. It’s very tempting to want to play in bigger games, as you can win more money there, but it’s a dangerous proposition if you don’t have the proper bankroll for those stakes.

Poker is a game of streaks, good and bad, and you need to be sure that you have enough money to ride out the bad streaks. If playing at a certain stakes means bringing all of your bankroll to the table, where you could lose it in just an hour or two, you’re playing stakes too high for your bankroll.

A good rule of thumb is to be sure you have at least 200 big bets in your bankroll for whatever stakes you decide to play. If you’re playing $1/2 Limit Hold’em, you should have at least $400 total in your bankroll. This gives you enough of a cushion to go through the normal swings of the game without going broke and losing all of your money.

Winning at poker in the long run is a marathon, not a sprint. All the great players have started at the bottom, just like you, and slowly worked their way up through the limits, moving up step by step when they’ve won enough to give them the bankroll to move up to the next limit.