The Other End of Your Roll

If you visit any forum, you’ll find a thread on bankroll. You can see JB’s articles on managing one in our articles section. Geiststaat also has articles here on the subject. But, there is a bankroll that isn’t really covered and that’s what I want to talk about.

I was setting at the Stud table the other day and a fellow got lucky. He started off rolled up with 3-9’s and proceeded to make a full house. Took down 3 or 4 bucks. Horrid! The side pot was greater. He’d made the bankroll mistake that is seldom talked about. He allowed the money he was playing to reach a level where he ended up all-in with betting still occurring. Great hands come along only so often. Without adequate funds in your stack, you cannot properly profit.

Whether you are playing limit or no limit, stay aware of your stack. Maintain the stack so that you can profit from your good hands. If you get in a decent pot and lose in a NL situation, rebuild your stack when you can and where a number of larger stack are in play.

I play .25-.50 Stud on several sites. The default stack size on those sites varies from $5 to $25. Antes to completion ratios do vary but hardly to the degree that the funding recommendation shows. While the $5 I put out on Full Tilt is adequate in most situation, there are the rare hands where it can be gone part way through the betting. It’ll feel really nasty if that happened and you are staring at quads.

NL has more options and choices. In typical play, you want to maintain/rebuild stacks when they cannot properly pressure your opponent. In you wish to play short stacked, read the article by Geiststaat that covers short stack techniques. (Go to the articles area and search on bankroll for a number of nice articles.)

One other stack related issue. OK, you’ve gone on a heater and now have a 4x buyin at your NL table. Do you want to keep active there? If the other stacks are substantially smaller, you are the target. If the table has been open a long time and there are a number of similar stacks, do you want the variance risk? In the bricks and mortar world, you may not have a lot of options. Online, you can get to another table with a standard buyin on most sites by opening a second table with a standard buy-in and then closing the deep stack table where you are the implied odds target.

We consider cards and position as a holy grail and often ignore our stack. Smart opponents don’t and we consider theirs – sometimes ignoring the impact ours has. We use the urban legend idea that we’ll stay at the hot table. That ignores statical relevance. Because a seat is good is no indication that will continue.

Of course, the ‘real’ bankroll management also applies. You want to be in a position to maintain your table stakes from your bankroll. If the funding requirements of your table don’t provide you with a comfortable leeway in maintaining your table stack, don’t play that level. You always need to be rational in determining that you can fund for variance at the stakes you play.

ADDENDUM:

UIGEA Silliness:, A leading interactive horse racing network, has used an exemption in the anti-online gambling legislation to launch an internet betting site for New York state residents after gained the approval of the New York State Racing and Wagering Board. You can box your next race wager for a big bet but can’t fund .01-.02 limit.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 11:39 am and is filed under Poker Thoughts. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.