Bankroll Management Guide for Casual Players

One of the most important decisions for any poker player is what stakes they should play. However, this decision is made on a different basis by those players who play poker professionally or are serious amateurs and by those players who are simply playing poker for fun and for the challenge. The pro is worried about maximizing his profit while minimizing his chance of going broke (risk of ruin, ROR). But the casual player just wants to be able to play for the evening at a level where he or she will be excited when they win and not too upset when they lose. So that’s what this article is going to help you do; find that balance that will give you excitement while you play, but the flexibility to keep playing if things are going badly for a while.

Limit Poker

Limit poker has a lot more swings than people might think. Anyone who plays limit games regularly knows that a swing of 50 big bets is practically a daily occurrence. A swing of 100 big bets feels horrible when it happens, but it’s pretty common too, and no where near as bad as it gets. (In a $2/$4 game a big bet is $4, in a $10/$20 game it’s $20, and so on.)

A 100 big bet bankroll is pretty much the bare minimum for playing a limit game, even as an amateur. But what is a bankroll? It’s basically the money you’ve allocated for playing poker. It may be the money in your BetUS Poker account, or it may be that plus whatever you’re willing to deposit. It could be a fixed sum of money or a certain amount per month. Put another way, your bankroll is the money you’re comfortable losing playing poker if things really don’t go your way for a long time.

100 big bets may be the minimum, but you certainly wouldn’t be crazy to go up to 200 or even 300 or more if you’re playing higher stakes games (say 10/20 and up) and you’re fairly conservative about money. Let’s take an example and I’ll give different suggestions corresponding to different personalities and levels of play.

Example

David is new to poker. He’s played Friday nights with his friends for a few months and really likes the game. He’s put $100 into his account, but wants that to last for a least a couple months of playing a couple evenings a week, an hour here or there, even if things are going badly. David wants to play limit poker, texas hold’em and maybe some 7 card stud. I would suggest 200 big bets to David, meaning he’d start out playing $0.25/$0.50. Those aren’t very high stakes so you can be at the lower end of the scale, but he wants it to last a while. There’s no science here, there can’t be.

No Limit

The concept of a big bet doesn’t make sense in No Limit. Instead we use big blinds, or buy ins. The buy in is really the best measure, because if you usually play less than the maximum to start, you have less risk and will win and lose smaller amounts. The same way 100-400 big bets was the range in Limit, the range is 5-20 buy ins for the casual No Limit player. The low end of that range should only be used by those players who really want to gamble, and don’t care too much if there’s a big chance of going broke. Unless you are playing bigger, more aggressive games or have an unusually bad run of luck 10 buy ins should be OK for more than a few sessions.