Bankroll management

It’s interesting to read people’s thoughts on bankroll management. Often you read that for full ring limit poker the required bankroll (for a winning player) is around 300BB. I assume that is 300 big blinds as opposed to big bets. Then people point out on the forums that 300 was the requirement of the old days – being a few years ago, when players were much much looser, and online poker was easy money.

Playing shorthanded, I obviously am subject to a higher degree of variance than full ring, so I’ve decided to be quite conservative with my bankroll management. At the moment with a $4k bankroll I’m still playing a lot of 1/2, however, I have no problem with playing 2/4 as well whenever I see a juicy table. I think I started taking shots at 2/4 when my bankroll was around $3k, but at that point the table had to be very fishy.

I’m not sure that I’m actually winning at 2/4 (I will have to check Pokertracker), however, there has been a dramatic increase in my bonus clearing rate, which would probably make up for fewer playing winnings.

So I guess as far as my bankroll management goes, I like to have around 1,000 big bets in my roll before I climb up limits. When will I take shots at 3/6? Hmmm, maybe when I have $5,000, but probably more like $6,000. I think I’m heading towards the upper limit of my comfort zone of how much I like to have riding on individual hands, although the actual $ don’t influence my playing decisions. The other reason I think I’m getting more conservative as I go up, is that the opposition is obviously a lot stronger, so my win rate will obviously go down.

So far I don’t think I’ve ever tilted enough to join a table that is outside of my bankroll. (and I don’t think I tilt too much at all, but that can be a topic of another blog).

With respect to SitnGos, I think commonly recommended is 30 to 100 buyins. I think that with the SitnGos that I play (double ups), I’m sure you could get away with the lower end of the scale. Admittedly after playing nearly 100 I’ve made only about 20 buyins profit. And this is only at the $5 or $10 level. Over that 100 I’ve never experienced a super bad run, although I did manage to only double up on 3/10 at one stage. I think I’ve doubled the last 7 out of 7 though, and have had a few similar runs in my 100 tourney sample. That being said, 100 tourneys I’m sure is an extremely small sample.

How has the poker been going otherwise – well up and down as per usual. I had a shocking run the other day where I
Received hardly any starting hands (VPIP around 15)
When I did get a hand, it never hit (WTSD around 25%)
When I did get to SD, I was getting sucked out on or had second best all the time (W$SD 18%) …. Someone hitting trips on the river 3 or 4 times in the few hands that I played was extremely frustrating!
I ended up losing a quick $100, however, at the same time cleared my $150 sun poker bonus.

On the plus side as well, I have almost cleared all my bonuses for the month, with only an hour or so to go on William Hill as a must clear. Cake I have a couple weeks to clear a $300 bonus, however that is released in increments of $10. I will focus on Cake for a while, and then try to clear my Chan bonus, and maybe do another $100 reload on Sun.

Current bankroll: $4,250