Bankroll management for online grinders

Whether you’re eking out a living or supplementing income playing sit’n’gos online, or travelling the world on the professional poker circuit, there is one side skill which everyone playing poker has to develop: bankroll management. Even if the $500 you have online is for recreational purposes only, a bit of discipline and financial sense will stop it seemingly evaporating immediately. There’s no harm in getting into good habits early on, and in the long run treating your bankroll, that is, the money set aside solely for playing the game of poker, carefully will reap you rewards.

To start with the low-limit grinders – the people with a very limited bankroll who stubbornly play online to make a small living instead of getting a regular job. I tried this for about two years, insisting that my $1,000 was enough to make the rent, pay the bills and drive a car indefinitely. Although I just about survived without spiralling into debt or going broke even once (which I know was sheer luck and for which I am very thankful) it was very difficult, and involved probably more hours spent doing something repetitive in front of a computer than most regular jobs do.

There are two main problems with this idea of turning something small into something big – one is that usually there’s not a huge reward at the end of a day’s playing $0.25/$0.50 pot limit hold’em, or $20 tournaments, just enough to maintain the original bankroll while skimming off enough for the council tax etc. The second is that the range of games you can play with this amount of money at your back is strictly limited.

This leads to the best advice I have for the small bankroll managers – don’t play a big game. The $200 sit-down Omaha on your favourite site might be a gambler’s paradise and full of nutters just giving it away, but with $1,000 you only have in total five buy-ins to this game. To put it in perspective: get it all in with trips against that straight-flush wrap on the flop once and lose, and –bang- there goes one fifth of your money. Similarly, $100 rebuy tournaments are out, as are the bigger no-limit and pot limit cash games. So you reckon you could do well in them, and you probably could. This is not the point – your ego might not like the bottom-feeder classification you get, but your money might just last the distance.

Multitable tournaments especially eat bankroll. With fields in the smaller buy-in ones sometimes getting into four figures, it doesn’t matter how wonderfully you play, you need to get some luck to make anything but a little over your money back (especially with the way the payouts on a lot of online tournaments work). Spending five to eight hours concentrating on one of these, say, $50 freezeouts only to come 25th out of 679 making $55.50 (a profit of, usually, $0.50) is frustrating and not the best time management.

I was, admittedly, unable to resist playing these, especially if one was just about to start when I turned on my PC. Mostly losing, the very occasional juicy win balanced it out, but I had to be realistic. One buy-in to a $30 tournament represented almost four hours, on average, of little cash game grinding. Sure, the carrot at the end of the stick when it comes to online tournaments with their huge fields and big final table money is nice and alluring, but the reality is that for every one of these you win, so many of them will end with no result.

So what about sit’n’gos? An extremely high variance proposition, everyone playing low buy-in sit’n’gos will have experienced the run of losses which tests the patience of any player. Perhaps best thing to do with these is play lots of them, preferably at once. Instead of playing one $100 sit’n’go, try three or four $20 ones. The standard is probably a little weaker, and there’s almost a formula to playing them (extensively discussed by many players), especially if the blinds go up per number of hands played as they do on several sites. Spreading the variance is key to making a little money stretch a long way.

Now is probably the time to mention the second most important aspect of bankroll management – accurate record keeping. Applicable to low-limit and high-limit players alike, there is nothing more helpful in the long run than having a spreadsheet detailing win/loss, time and game played. As an example, take the sit’n’gos mentioned above. I started off playing these and won about six in a row. “Great!” I thought. Then I lost about ten in a row. It was only after several weeks of playing nothing but STTs that I began to get an accurate picture of how profitable they were. On average, I made a third of a buy-in per tournament. Given that I was playing $10 and $20 ones, that came to about $5 per sit’n’go.

Of course, if your record book says that you’re consistently losing money in all areas, it may be necessary to reconsider online poker as a substitute for or addition to working. I rarely meet players who admit to losing in the long run, but poker is a zero sum game so someone has to be. If losing a bit is no big deal, and a recreational occupation only, it’s still a good idea to pinpoint exactly how much money you’re actually spending. It is only natural to round up winning sessions in one’s head while rounding down losing ones, but this is destructive in the long run.

When it comes to cash games, especially the lower buy-in no-limit hold’em games which are now overwhelmingly popular online, the same rules apply. I tend not to play in a game I don’t have at least five buy-ins at hand for. There’s absolutely no point buying in for the minimum in a big bet game, and if something goes horribly wrong early on you have to be able to just pull up without worrying about it and start again. Because of the random element online, whose money slowly tends to drift towards the better players, there is high variance in the little no-limit games too. This is especially noticeable when an online table’s maximum buy-in is only 25 or 50 big blinds.

This is the final thing to keep an eye on – without an exceptional run, you need more bankroll for what looks like a small game than you’d think. There is always the chance that with one shot $100 will turn into $500, but there’s much more chance that it won’t. Cash game profit (in limit at least) can be measured in big bets per hour, and I reckon you’re doing well if you consistently make two to three. This might not be the rags-to-immediate-riches you’d like, but having a realistic expectation of what a small bankroll can make you on a regular basis is the first step towards managing it properly, and hopefully making it pay for you.