If you want to succeed as a Poker player, you have to learn about poker bankroll management. This is simply the science and art of juggling your available bankroll to ensure you can play at your best while minimizing negative fluctuations that tear away at your profits. By putting a little thought into this matter, you should be able to consistently achieve better results and improve your bottom line.

Read through this article carefully to learn some essential poker bankroll tips, and you’ll find that money management poker becomes second nature to you. Poker bankroll management can be learned quickly and it won’t take any effort to implement since it ultimately boils down to making a budget and sticking with it as you go through the game.

Should You Bother Doing Poker Bankroll Management?

There is a specific reason why it’s crucial to put some thought into poker bankroll management, and the technical term is “variance”. In simple terms, it just means that luck plays a major part in your game over the long run: some days you’ll be ahead and some days you’ll fall behind. The entire concept behind money management poker is to minimize the impact a bad luck streak on your bankroll, by setting specific boundaries to how much money you’ll have on you before joining a game session.

So how do you get started with your poker bankroll management efforts? The first and most important step is to determine what is your available bankroll; it’s important to keep in mind that your poker bankroll is not the same as the money you have available in the bank. It’s actually the money you can afford to lose without sacrificing your everyday routine.

You should never gamble with money you can’t lose, not only because that would make for bad financial planning in general, but also because you can’t possibly expect to play your best game if you’re worried that losing a hand could mean having to endure hardships of any kind in your everyday routines. So if you’re serious about becoming an advanced poker player, you have to begin by compartmentalizing your bankroll and separate your everyday expenses from your funds available to play poker.

Essential Money Management Tips to Succeed as a Poker Player

Once you figure out what is your available bankroll for playing poker, the next step will be to decide the fraction of the bankroll you can afford to put into a single game session. As a general rule, you should avoid putting more than 10% of your bankroll into a game, in other to ensure your available funds will allow you to keep you playing through multiple sessions. This approach will help you withstand negative variance, since even if some of your sessions turn out to be disastrous, the remaining sessions should make up for it. You may also want to get in the habit of cutting losses by aborting any particular game session where you seem to be consistently having bad luck or playing below your usual level.

Once you’ve decided your available bankroll for a single game session, you then have to choose the suitable tables by comparing the buy-in amount with your bankroll; if you want to grow as a poker player, it’s important to find a good balance here since going for stakes which are took high will make you too dependent on luck to be able to stay in the game, while stakes that are too low will make it hard to grow the bankroll. Ideally, you should look for tables where your available bankroll will allow you get around 20 buy-ins for a regular cash game or around 50 buy-ins for tournaments.

Setting your bankroll limits works just like setting a budget on your everyday expenses, in the sense that it’s ultimately an arbitrary decision on how to best manage your available funds. As such, one of the most important things in poker bankroll management – once you figure out your bankroll limits – is to effectively respect those limits when you’re out there playing poker.

It’s important to keep in mind that you must learn to be very strict with yourself, regarding the bankroll limits you have established to yourself before joining a game. There is no point in taking the time to do the entire math if you end up getting caught up on the emotions of the game and breaking the limits you had previously established. If you feel you may have a hard time sticking to your bankroll limits on the heat of the moment, you can find ways to effectively restrict the amount of cash you have in your favored online poker room before you actually step into the game.

Keep this advice in mind, and you will find you’ll be able to stay alive in the casino for much longer! You will also have consistently better results compared to what you’d achieve by just playing on a whim every single time.