Bankroll management is how you manage the money that you use for poker or betting. There are certain recommendations that you should follow to keep your money in order but these are not rules and everyone manages their money a little differently. The golden rule of bankroll management is that you should be comfortable with the risk and leave some room for flexibly playing poker the way you want to. When you withdraw money, how much you risk and what you do when you win and when you lose should be pre-arranged.
The only time this type of money management in poker can be ignored is when you are taking part in freerolls or free online poker. If you want to play some free online poker before you get started, visit https://www.bwin.com/free-online-poker and get familiar with the game before you start your bankroll challenge.
Gamcare and Gamblers Anonymous would not exist if people were able to manage their relationship with risk and the potentially addictive nature of poker and gambling in general. Unfortunately people get carried away and by potentially being able to earn money and by nature we human beings want to repeat things that make us feel good or work out well for us. Poker should be enjoyed, but with constant monitoring that things are as they should be and that your relationship with it has not become dependant. If you start feeling like your life is not worth living unless you are playing poker then you probably need to address whether your relationship with poker is becoming unhealthy for you.
I use bankroll management as a way of tightly managing how much I risk at any one time. Carl Sampson correctly pointed out in one of his articles I recently had the pleasure of reading that many players ”have not got the nerve, inclination or ability to play anything higher than the micro-stakes cash games. ” This need not be the case if they can alter their relationship with money and look at it in terms of bankroll and units rather than real money. This allows them to play higher whilst still operating at a certain risk exposure level to their bankroll.
Players must observe when this strategy is no longer useful. At some players will be unable to think of their bankroll as units and start thinking of it as money again. It is naïve to assume we could think of our $2 million bankroll as 20 units of $100,000 when you only earn $30,000 in your normal job, sanity must prevail. Bankroll management demands that you are very honest with yourself on what you are mentally able to gamble. The moment you start playing differently because of the money at stake in a pot, e.g. checking instead of betting, you are playing too high. This could still be at a small amount of money; some people just do not have the gamble in them and even losing a pot worth $0.50 is something they struggle to deal with.
The importance of sensible bankroll management is growing. You can now access real money poker games more easily than ever before even playing poker on the phone at bwin.com if you want to play poker on the move. It would be very easy to simply keep pumping money into your poker account just to stay involved but it is far better to set some money aside specifically for poker. This can actually be a good thing if you are prone to randomly spending money on things you do not need or impulse buy online. At least you are trying to do something with your money, but if you bust your bankroll before re-depositing I think you should always either seek a coaches advice on what went wrong or do some fairly intensive session reviews on your own.
In part 2 of this feature we are going to analyse the rules of bankroll management that will help structure your online poker play. I am following it and it is great fun. Perhaps if you follow a similar challenge you can comment on this article and update us on your bankroll management challenge progress.
By Malcolm Clarke
