The Poker Corner

Maybe you’ve been playing a little poker, for fun, just the occasional game with friends. Cards, chips, conversation, with nothing more at stake than a few bucks and perhaps the risk of some good-natured ribbing if you’re tapped out at the end. You enjoy yourself. You have a good time. You have a smile on your face the whole time.

Even though it feels like something’s missing. Because you’re in the mood for a challenge. You’d like to play in a game where everyone is more interested in winning than just having a good time. That’s what you’re interested in—winning. Beating the game. Using your brains and guts and heart to win every chip at the table.

If you’ve made this decision, congratulations—you’re about to ascend the ladder of poker success. Or descend the chute into degenerate gambling. Or, most likely, end up somewhere in between. At any rate, you’re about to find out that brains, heart and guts aren’t enough to succeed in poker. You also need cash. Chips. A bankroll.

There’s an old saying—if you want to make money, you have to spend money. And that’s more true in poker than just about any other situation. You can’t win the money in the pot without first throwing in some of your own. And since you aren’t going to win every pot you enter you need some working capital to play with until Lady Luck drapes her shawl across your shoulders and snuggles down in your lap.

If you’re going to play poker seriously, it’s a good idea to have a totally separate pool of funds for just that purpose. It makes it easier to keep track of your wins and losses, and should help you resist the urge to splurge after a big win. It’s not spending money; it’s your poker money. Besides, it’s cool in conversation to bring up your “bankroll”—it makes you sound like a serious player.

Even if you’re playing low-limit Hold-Em. Because your bankroll should in large part dictate what limit you play at. If your ego won’t allow you to play some piddling $1/$2 Hold-Em, but you only want to make an initial $100 investment in your poker adventure, you need an attitude adjustment from the get-go. There’s a paradox at play here—you’re playing for money, you want to win money, but you have to act as if the money doesn’t matter. You have to make your decisions based on the cards, on your opponents, on the odds—not on the visions of greenbacks dancing in your head.

Perhaps you'd like to hear from a more authoritative source. In a recent interview that appeared on pokerlizard.com, champion poker player Todd Brunson put it this way:

"To me in poker, a bet is a bet. Be it $5 or $500,000. People are often surprised to see me play hard when I play $2-$4 but I am a competitor and I play to win. A $2 bet is still a bet and I treat it as such. By the same token a $200,000 bet is still just a bet, nothing more nothing less. If you say to yourself "well this bet is just $4, I'll call with no pair and no draw" you will lose in the long run. It's the same at the other end of the spectrum. If someone bets $100,000 and you say to yourself "Well...I have a flush and I'm pretty sure it's good and I know I'm supposed to call but the bet is $100,000 and that's just too much" you will also lose."

In his book The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King, author Michael Craig writes about poker superstar Ted Forrest returning to Vegas after a trip to LA. On the way home he called the poker room at the Bellagio to see if they had a game running that might interest him. They did— $10,000/$20,000 limit Hold-Em, bigger than any game Forrest had ever heard of. As he drove toward the bright lights of the Strip Forrest kept asking himself, “Am I playing? Am I playing?” Sitting in his safe deposit box at the Bellagio were $500,000 in red, white and blue chips (or “flags”) which made up Forrest’s entire bankroll. Not every dime he owned—but all the money he had for playing poker. Forrest decided the game—which was a heads-up affair between the legendary Chip Reese and Andy Beal, a player Forrest had never seen before—was too good to pass up. A few hours later, when Forrest was down about $400K, he was wishing he’d erred on the side of caution. It doesn’t take a long time, or a long run of tough luck, to make a big dent in your bankroll.

We all saw what happened to Mike McD in Rounders, right? He put his entire bankroll into play, got trapped in one nightmarish hand, and ended up having to spend eight months driving Knish’s truck and having Gretchen Mol furrow her brows at him. You don’t need that. Poker is a game of ups and downs, you’re going to run cold, you’re going to have runs of tough luck. If you don’t have enough money to play with you run the risk of going broke before the cosmic forces realign and the cards start running your way. In several of his books author David Sklansky says that your bankroll should be at least 300 times the size of the big bet in the game you want to play in. For example, if you want to play $1/$2, you should have around $600. If you want to play $15/$30 you should have around $9,000. This should place in stark relief the foolishness of playing in a $15/$30 game with a $1/$2 bankroll.

So guard your bankroll against catastrophe. Work your way up through the limits, moving up when you've built up enough of a reserve to handle the inevitable swings. And, if you do suffer a prolonged downswing, don't hesitate to move back down again. Maybe your game has plateaued and needs some work before you move up against better players, or maybe you're just getting screwed. Either way, your bankroll can give you an honest indication of how you're running. If you don't listen, the jokes and insults you took after your friendly games will seem like music to your ears compared to the silence coming from your empty wallet.