Jessica Lunsford Blog

It seems simple enough when deciding how much money you should bring to a poker table: As much as you can afford to lose, right? Well, yes and no.

The fact that your bankroll can fall as well as rise is known as variance. The more aggressive your pokerstyle, the greater your variance will be. But however cautious you are, you will experience ups and downs.

Here’s an example for a beginner: You sit down at a $1 table with $20 and win a couple of big hands. All of a sudden you are winning by $70 and, well, this game is easy, right? But for every lucky beginner, there is a much greater chance that will go bust before you win anything.

This is where bankroll is critical. You need to have a bankroll that allows you to have a bad run without going bust. If you go bust, you never get to see the upswing that will likely follow if you are playing solid poker. Inevitably, not managing your bankroll, no matter how good you are, will result in failure. It’s just simple math. The house always wins. Ask any World Series of Poker champion, and he or she will tell you that they have gone over their bankroll and lost any winnings in their past.

Generally, for beginners, you should never be playing with more than 10% of your bankroll. For example, if you deposit $100 into your account, you shouldn’t take more than $10 to any game.

Thus that should decide what table you play. A sound strategy is you should buy in for at least 50 times the big bet (so if you only have $100, stay at a $2 table max), and have a bankroll of 100 times the big bet.

It’s also important to stick at your bankroll limit. Unfortunately in online poker it’s easy to just use your credit card and keep betting, where perhaps at a casino you can leave your credit card at home and just bring a certain amount of cash. In online poker, it’s more imperative to keep your ego and impatience in check. As a way of perhaps monitoring yourself, keep a daily diary of your sessions. This will help you determine if you are a winning or a losing player and how often you win. You also might want to consider using a service that will monitor your playing patterns and winnings/losses.