Poker Bankroll

A poker bankroll, in this discussion, is the amount of money you have placed on the side for use in playing real money poker.

A lot of players play a lot of poker and don't think about a bankroll often, if at all. They buy into tournaments or sit down at a cash game. If they win, they may have extra spending money on the weekend. If they lose, poker is how they used some of their spending money for the week.

Other players strive to be long-term winners at the game. They keep track of their wins and losses at the tables. And, they keep their poker-playing money separate. They have, and use a poker bankroll.

How large should my starting bankroll be?
Good question. The starting guideline I've seen is 300 Big Bets. If you play $1/2 limit, that's 2 x 300, or $600. I can't imagine depositing $600 at an online poker room just so I can play dollar/deuce poker.

Why such a high figure then? A lot of the talk about poker bankrolls is really talk about moving up in limits. So when someone is moving from a $3/6 game to start playing at the $5/10 game, if they plan on staying at the $5/$10 tables, they should have built their bankroll into something large enough to handle 300 big bets.

The natural swings that happen during the course of play can have a dramatic affect on an undersized bankroll. Even when playing well, losses can add up. And if your bankroll isn't large enough to handle those swings, you can bust out.

What is the advantage of having a poker bankroll?
Here's the fun stuff. In the world of online poker building a poker bankroll has an immediate benefit. Because so many of the rooms offer bonuses that depend upon the amount of the deposit, being able to deposit more means you can claim larger bonuses. If a room is running a 100% deposit bonus for new players, and you can make a $300 deposit, you'll fare better than if you could only make a $125 deposit.

It's easier to build a bankroll playing at the online poker rooms beause each winning session doesn't end with actual cash in your pocket that you could spend on the way home. It sits in your account online unless you withdraw it.

With the bother of depositing and withdrawing online, and all of the record-keeping that the online poker rooms do for you, it is easier to see your wins and losses in online poker. And it's easier to watch your bankroll grow or shrink. It is also easier to see the importance of managing it well, since the size of your stack translates directly into the amount of bonuses you can claim.

How can I grow my bankroll?
By winning at the tables of course. You can also grow it by taking advantage of deposit bonuses and playing at least break-even poker. Remember when playing for a bonus, it is the combined profit of your bonus and your table-winnings that you should use to keep score. Some rooms offer fantastic bonuses, and so they draw the better players. Playing against them may reduce the amount you would usually win at the tables. It may reduce it by more than you earn from the bonus!

Or, you may find that poker bonuses, when added to the smaller wins you can take from a low limit table, make for a nice hourly rate.

Resources
Here are links to a couple of good poker bankroll articles. One is by Chris Ferguson, World Series of Poker Champion, and also a man that took $1 and turned it into over $20,000. This time he's talking about the bankroll management rules he's imposed on himself in his quest to turn $0 into $10,000.

Here's another link, this one to a pocketFives.com article by pokerFox. In it, he addresses the different bankroll requirements for different types of players.