You can be the best entrepreneur in the world, but if you don’t have cashflow, you can’t operate a business. That’s the way poker works, too. Skills are important; maintaining your bankroll is even more important.
Play Poker online at Bovada
What Is Poker Bankroll Management?
When we talk about bankroll management (BRM) in poker, we’re talking about how to handle the money that you have set aside to play the game – that includes the money in your account, as well as any other funds you have dedicated specifically for playing poker. BRM Rule No. 1: Keep your poker money separate from the rest of your money.
While this article covers poker bankroll management for beginners, we can’t stress enough how important BRM is for intermediate and advanced players as well. The basic principles of BRM should be applied no matter where you are on your poker journey; there are more advanced BRM concepts you can learn here at Bovada to improve your skills in this area, once you’ve got the basics down pat.
Risking Your Bankroll
The general concept behind BRM is to keep your risk of ruin at a minimum. In poker, anything higher than a 5% risk of ruin is considered undesirable. Something closer to 2% is much more palatable.
To achieve this, you need to play at stakes that don’t put too much of your bankroll on the table all at once. Imagine a diversified portfolio where you have your money spread across a number of investments, like a combination of index funds, bonds, and a smattering of high-risk stocks. Every hand of poker you play is an investment; if you bet your entire bankroll on one hand, your risk of ruin will soar through the roof. Don’t let this happen to you. Spread that investment over a large number of hands, at stakes you can afford.
Building Your Bankroll
In the beginning, as you’re learning how to build a working cash game strategy and/or multi-table tournament strategy, you can expect your bankroll to go down more than it goes up. Instead of assuming you’re going to boss the tables, focus on minimizing your losses by playing at the lowest stakes available – that’ll be 2c/5c for cash poker, and a $1 buy-in or less for tournaments.
Here’s the good news: If you’re willing and able, you can learn how to “beat” the microstakes in a fairly short amount of time. And once you do, you can concentrate on building your bankroll rather than just protecting it. The key here is to think about optimal growth; that is, to get those digits moving upwards as quickly and smoothly as possible, while also maintaining your low risk of ruin.
This can be achieved by playing the poker games at Bovada that give you the best return on your investment, as measured by your hourly winrate. Of course, you’ll need to do some accounting to figure out your winrate at the tables. Keep track of this by downloading your hand histories and looking at the results over a suitably large number of hands – putting in 100,000 hands is recommended, but you can get some idea of your performance over 10,000 hands. You might want to use some reliable poker tracking software to help you do the accounting.
Where Your Bankroll Should Start
As a beginner, you should consider starting your poker journey with enough bankroll to help you collect as much of that Welcome Bonus money as possible – at least $500. That should be enough for you to play a healthy number of hands at the microstakes. If you happen to run out early, there’s no shame in reloading, but take a moment first to consider how your journey is going, and whether you want to continue. And as with any investment, only play poker with dedicated poker money that you can afford to lose.
Beyond that, once you’re a winning player at the microstakes and you know your winrate, you can figure out how big your bankroll should be to keep your risk of ruin suitably low. There are free poker variance calculators you can use online to help you do the math, but as a very quick rule of thumb, you’ll want at least 20 buy-ins if you’re playing the cash games. At the 2c/5c tables, if you’re buying in for 100 big blinds at a time, that means 20 times $5, or $100 in total. If you’re playing tournaments, you’ll want at least 100 buy-ins, so again, that’s $100 for tournaments where the buy-in is $1 or less.
Cash Games
To practice effective poker cash game bankroll management, players need to take into account which poker game they’re playing online or live: Texas Hold’em, Omaha, or Omaha Hi/Lo. Each of these games brings a different level of variance to the table. For the same reason, players should also note which betting structure the game uses: fixed-limit, pot-limit, or no-limit.
NL Cash Games
The most popular games at Bovada Poker online – and around the world – are the no-limit games, especially no-limit Texas Hold’em poker. As a quick rule of thumb, you should have a bankroll of 20 buy-ins for no-limit Texas Hold’em. This for a cash game can be anywhere up to the max amount allowed, although most people choose to play 100 big blinds deep.
The cheapest cash games at Bovada are 2NL, or 1c/2c blinds, which would require a $40 bankroll using the recommended guidelines for Hold’em poker. However, consider using even more buy-ins if you’re playing at 6-max tables rather than full ring. Fewer people at the table means you’ll be in more pots, so you need to account for that higher variance.
It’s also a good idea to adjust your buy-in levels higher or lower when you’re playing games other than Hold’em poker. As a split pot game, Omaha Hi/Lo has by far the least variance, since so many of the pots you play will be chopped between one player with the high hand and another with the low hand. This will allow you to play NL comfortably with fewer than 20 buy-ins. Omaha, on the other hand, can get really swingy – fortunes can rise and fall dramatically, since the difference in value between the best and worst hands is a lot smaller than it is in Hold’em poker, and more pots end up going all the way to showdown. Bring more to the table when you play Omaha so that you can ride out these swings and avoid going bust.
Limit Cash Games
Another great way to smooth out the variance in poker is to play under a different betting structure than no-limit. Most Omaha cash games are played under pot-limit rules, where the most you can bet at any one time is the size of the pot. That will lessen the impact of a bad run of cards and protect your bankroll furthering the management of it. Even better, try playing Fixed-Limit cash games, also known as Limit games for short. The biggest bet you can make in limit poker is the big bet, which is twice the size of the big blind.
Limit poker is the most popular way to play Omaha Hi/Lo, making this arguably the best game for building a bankroll – provided you play well enough to have an edge on your opponents. Limit Hold’em used to be the most popular version of that variant until the no-limit games took over sometime around the early 2000s. Limit Hold’em cash games need a much smaller bankroll than the No-Limit version; 300 big bets is a safe starting point.
Bankroll Management for Sit-n-Go’s
Sit-n-go’s are the happy medium of poker variance. They compress the time commitment and the payout structure of larger tournaments, allowing you to put in more volume while also reducing the highs and lows of your bankroll’s management progress. Again, your buy-in requirements will depend on which games you’re playing. The vast majority of sit-n-go’s are no-limit Hold’em poker, but the number of players at the poker table will differ.
Single-Table SNG
If you’re playing a classic Single-Table sit-n-go at a full-ring table, you should have a minimum of 30 buy-ins before signing up, compared to at least 100 buy-ins for a Multi-Table poker tournament. Bring more buy-ins to the table if you’re playing a 6-max or a short-handed SNG.
Heads-Up SNG
This is as small as a sit-n-go can get. You can play these more quickly than other SNGs and put in more volume, but all the prize money goes to the winner, so variance can once again rear its ugly head. Try 50 buy-ins or more with this format.
Keep in mind, to learn the basic bankroll requirements and strategy for all the different poker fun is just a starting point. There are other factors that affect how to manage poker bankroll considerations properly, such as style of play and quality of opposition. As you improve at poker, you’ll be able to account for these differences better and adjust accordingly, but for now, stick with these online guidelines until you as the poker player has more time to get all the poker information you need. Best of luck at the poker tables.
Sign up to Bovada today
Our Stories
