Bankroll Management

Four time WSOP bracelet winner Bobby Baldwin once said "The mark of a top player is not how much he wins when he is winning but how he handles his losses".

But bankroll management is boring.

It's been 3 years since I started playing poker and when I started out I didn’t even know what bankroll management was. If you had told me what it was before I started I still wouldn’t have done it, but I wish I had.

I started playing after watching a fair amount of poker on TV and thinking, “I’d be good at that”. So I stuck $100 into the biggest and most advertised poker site at the time and got to work being a total fish. I understood that I wasn’t going to make money straight away and that for the first while I would lose money, but I had plenty of disposable income, so that wasn't an issue.

There's a lot of platers interviewed on TV saying they’ve been playing for a few years, so although I was not expecting to make it onto TV, I did think that it wasn't unreasonable to think 3 years was enough time to win back any money I’d lost learning, cos you know, these guys on TV must all be making loads of money(!).

My basic plan looked something like this;
year 1 – I’ll lose money learning
year 2 – I’ll be working towards breaking even
year 3 – I’ll be in profit!

I thought that was a realistic expectation from poker, I’m a clever chap; it shouldn’t be too hard...

With Doyle’s Super System in hand, I played some freerolls and dollar games to begin with, got the jist of things or so I thought, and then went about making my biggest mistakes in poker. I went up a level, and then another level, then another far, all too soon. After a good run on the $10 sit n gos, I moved up to the $30 tables (the $20 weren't filling up fast enough for my liking...). A few wins at the $30 tables and there was no going back, this was easy! But variance is a terrible thing and I lost the money as quickly as I made it, not knowing any better I kept playing at $30 level and so my wins and losses yo-yoed dramatically for over a year.

I thought I was keeping a record of my winnings/losses in my head but it turns out I was way out. After winning $900 in a tournament, I thought I’d broken even, sadly I was wrong. I requested my money transaction history from the poker site and the news was bad. Even after my big win, I was still $1200 down. Oh dear.

Although being $1200 down wasn't great, the real problem was I had no idea. I had lost $1200 that I wasn't even aware of! That's just not good, and so my bankroll management journey began.

I now keep meticulous records of all money spent and won on poker and have a monthly deposit limit of $100. I still don't abide by proper bankroll management, I buy-in to games with a bigger percentage of my monthly bankroll than I should but it seems to be going well enough at the moment to maintain that.

In the last year I'm showing over a $1000 profit, which is good but in truth I'm still losing overall due to the two years before it. I'm almost there though and I have actually held off posting this blog for a few weeks now in the hope that I could report I was in profit, alas that's not yet the case. I have flirted into overall profit a few times this year but currently I’m $100 down.

It pains me when discussing poker with non-poker people and they inevitably ask "so how much have you won?" and I have to tell them I’m losing. In hindsight the reason is my lack of bankroll management, not necessarily my play but that doesn't help.

I wish I'd heard of stories such as Annette Obrestad, turning nothing into sizable bankrolls, those are inspirational examples of what can be done. Those are top class players but at its essence if you have never deposited, you can never be anything but a winning player. In my view the dedication and effort involved in turning nothing into something helps shape the qualities of a great player. I'm toying with limiting myself to a challenge like this but I'm afraid I am too much of an action junkie to go through with it, but then maybe that's exactly why I'm not winning.

Bankroll management is essential.