A BANKROLL
If you’re playing poker for fun, you need to have enough money to last you through the weekend.
A few hundred dollars is enough or maybe a couple of thousand if you play for higher limits.
If you lose it, well, you’ll get another paycheck and you can save up some more money to play with.
Because no matter how good you are, there will be times when you do lose it.
Of course, if you’re playing for fun and win, then you have a little extra money to spend.
If you’re playing poker for a living, then none of that’s true. Your money is your inventory.
Lose it and you’re out of work. You have to keep your playing bankroll sacred-and it has to be large.
Large enough to withstand weeks of losses because long streaks of losing can and do happen. How large does your playing bankroll have to be? Let’s just say pretty large.
Some guidelines for minimum sizes are given in the table.
Your bankroll can’t be too large, and my advice is to maintain some other sources of nonpoker income instead of exclusive reliance on a fixed bankroll.
These recommendations in the following table are for your playing bankroll.
You’ll also need a reserve for living expenses because you won’t be getting a paycheck and you won’t win every week, or even every month.
A reserve of one year’s minimum living expenses is probably about right. Also remember that the larger poker games often won’t be available forty hours a week.
More poker pros go broke from spending their bankroll than from losses at poker.
In addition to a playing bankroll, you need to have sufficient savings to allow you to pay your bills without depleting your bankroll.
There will be periods when you’re just not winning enough to cover your bills. Keeping at least a year’s living expenses in reserves is not too much.
If you’re a professional player with no other source of income, your bankroll has to be big enough to withstand a run of bad luck in which you have a very small chance of going broke.
The mathematicians call this “risk of ruin.”
If you lose some of your bankroll due to bad luck, your risk of going broke increases.
To offset that you’ll often have to start playing for smaller stakes,cutting your potential income.
If your bankroll gets small enough that you can’t play at a limit big enough to allow you to pay your expenses, then it’s probably time to give it up and get a job.
