Poker Articles

Looking at Bankrolls in Poker - Part 1

In this series of three articles on bankroll management I will be hoping to debunk many of the myths that are spoken about regarding this relatively little understood part of the game. I will start off by talking about the first form of poker that I ever played as a pro and that was limit hold’em. All of the older literature spoke about having 250 big bets in your bankroll for this type of poker. In fact I still see this piece of rubbish quoted so often that it really makes me shudder just how much bad advice is circulating on the internet about poker.

What we have to remember here is that your earn rate is connected to your standard deviation and with it the level of variance. The factors that go into your earn rate are based on many things but your own skill level pitched against that of your opponents is up there as being the most important. So what this means is that if your skill level when compared to that of your opponents reduces in effectiveness then your earn rate falls. This then means that your edge diminishes and so the swings and variance increase.

Better opponents are by sheer definition far more aggressive and so this means that the pots are often larger. So when you experience a sequence of losses then you will do so for greater amounts of money. Also stronger opponents will be smart enough to make you fold the best hand more frequently as well and their extra aggression will mean that this is the case. So once again your swings will increase because the extra profit from winning pots and the smaller pots that you lose when you do not have the best hand combine to dramatically increase the variance.

Editor's note: Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk

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