Tech | Internet | Programming | Wordpress | Humour

From the desk of Samy,

One of the most common mistakes of fishes/newbies poker players is to play outside of their own economic possibilities. Either for not wanting to drop down a limit or for pride, a lot of people stay when they have to stop playing that limit because they don’t have enough bankroll for it. The most common causes are the fact of wanting more money faster or the fact of being tilt, meaning that you become more looser, damaging your game and consequently, your winnings.

What is the consequence of playing outside your possibilities? Bankrupt. We want to avoid this, but how can we know we are playing in an appropiate limit according to our bankroll? I’m talking about cash games, specially Texas Hold’em No Limit. First of all, you have to get familiarized with the word buy-in. Let’s better see an example: we are playing NL10, and blinds are 0.05/0.1$, and you want to join a table. Which how much stack are you going to join a table? It will be between 2 and 10$. If you enter with 2$, your buy-in means 2$. If you enter with 10$, then, your buy-in means 10$. Now, we can calculate which should be our limit depending on our bankroll.

First, calculate your bankroll in buy-ins. For instance, if your buy-in is 2$ and you’ve got 200$, you’ve got 100 buy-ins. Easy, isn’t it? if your buy-in is 10$ and you’ve got 200$, you’ve got 20 buy-ins.

Once we know this, the rule is:

You need, at least, 25 buy-ins in order to play a determinate limit. So, calculate it.

Examples:

You’ve got 100$ and you want to know if you can afford NL10, knowing that my buy-in there would be just 2$. You’ve got a total of 50 buy-ins. So, you can play NL10 without problems because your bankroll will be stable. But if your buy-in in NL10 had been 10$, I would have had just 20 buy-ins, meaning that you should play at a lower limit.

However, 25 buy-ins are not always enough. 25 buy-ins are OK for low limits (NL2-NL25), but once you improve and start playing higher limits, you should have more than 25 buy-ins. How many? Well, there’s not a fixed rule about that but more or less, each time you wanna try a higher limit, you should have 5 buy-ins more than the last time you moved up. For instance, for NL25 you need 25 buy-ins. For NL50, 30. For NL100, 35… and so on. Notice that this is a way to protect yourself: downswings are worse at higher limits than at lower limits. 

And ending, why do we need a bankroll management? It doesn’t matter if you play very well, you can have a really bad downswing (in the end, it always happens from time to time!) and lose all your money. In order to avoid this, you have to manage your bankroll correctly, so you’ll be able to handle it. So, don’t be shelfish, if you’ve got less than 25 buy-ins, drop down a limit! If you are a good player, you will move up sooner or later and won’t risk your bankroll. Remember that good players are not those who play higher limits but those who can handle downswings and keep their bankroll increasing step by step.

…SaMy*^54

ShareThis