thebottle Blog

You should determine your initial bankroll now. This should be an amount that you feel comfortable with and can afford to lose. There is a saying in poker, “Never gamble with scared money.”

Now that you have determined your initial bankroll it is time to determine what games and limits you will want to play. You can play limit or no-limit tournaments and limit or no-limit cash games. Your bankroll should be 500x the big blind for a cash game player and 15x the amount of the buy-ins for a tournament player. These are low, but acceptable guidelines. You will not want to have any less than this, but it is alright and even recommended to have more. You will need an extra buffer to “live through” any losing streaks that you will encounter.

Your bankroll is a living entity and you need to feed it if you want to advance your game. This means that you do not cash out all your profits when you go on a large winning streak. The only way to move up through limits is by building your bankroll. Constantly cashing out your profits is going to get you stuck at the same level. I would never cash out more then 50% of a winning streak, but you will have to decide on the right amount for yourself. You may find that you should only cash out 35% of every winning streak, or maybe you can handle losing streaks much better than me and you may be able to cash out 70% of your winning streaks. You must adjust this rate to fit the patterns of your own game, but remember that cashing out too much will have a negative impact.

The cards are going to come cold, you have to expect it. You have to be willing to accept that you might sit at a table for four hours straight and not get a single real hand. How are you going to handle this? Are you going to start forcing plays? Playing more cards? The professional poker players have acquired a system through countless hours of play. They know what cards they start with and they know how they play their hands in every situation. They never deviate from their system. If you can’t handle this then you must learn to take breaks away from the game. You might need to take a break for a day, or maybe you will need to stop playing for a week. It all depends on how well you manage your emotions.

There are many reasons that a good player can go on a losing streak and you should be keeping an eye out for all of them. The sooner you realize what is happening the better prepared you will be to handle it. The most common mistake for amateur players occurs when they have just come off of a winning streak. They are bluffing and getting opponents to fold, betting and getting them to call. They are winning with nothing and winning with the best. Then the winning streak comes to an abrupt stop. It stops, but they don’t. They have been accustomed to making money at a certain rate and now that rate has slowed, but they don’t want to. They start forcing it and when they do that, they start losing. You can’t force the cards, you have to allow them to come to you. You can’t force your opponents, you have to allow them to fall in front of you.