Articles regarding managing your bankroll are there for a reason. Everybody would love to feel that they can sit at their computer, put fifty quid in their account and emerge some time later considerably richer.
Playing poker is not like playing the lottery – it takes time to develop the skills you need to make it a long term profitable experience and, although the potential of a big win may be your motivation, your first goals should be to show a profit – however small – while you are still polishing your techniques.
Bankroll management is all about finding the correct level for you to play at whilst polishing those techniques, and moving up through the ascendency as you get better – you should also use bankroll management to move down to safer ground should you hit a poor run.
There are sound reasons for controlling what level of multi table poker tournament you enter when first playing at online poker casinos. The natural caution and discipline you show in your first couple of multi table poker tournaments may well see you cash out more than once, and the temptation could be to immediately leap up a level or two and get involved in multi table poker tournaments where the rewards are more lucrative.
However, as boring as it sounds, you should stay at the same level as you initially start playing at until your bankroll indicates that you are in a position to elevate yourself to the more advanced games.
Moving up after a handful of multi table poker tournaments might see you run through your funds quicker than you would have hoped, as you take on more experienced players, playing harder poker because more prize money is at stake.
If you are a natural born poker player, and winning those early multi table poker tournaments, your bankroll would indicate that you should be moving up anyway – as the following examples show:-
Nobody should really put $600.00 in an online poker account if you have never played before. This example uses a more realistic balance of $100.00 as a starting point and focus on the 180-player multi table poker tournaments available on PokerStars.
When first playing in multi table poker tournaments, you should be looking at entering games with a buy-in of one twentieth of what you have in your account. So, if you have invested $100.00, your target game is around $5.00.
PokerStars offer MTTs at many different levels, but you should first enter the $4.00 + $0.40 game to see how you get on. If you finish within the top eighteen players, you cash. So if you finished tenth, you would collect $8.64 and your new bankroll total would be ($100.00 – $4.40 + $8.64) $104.24 – not quite enough to consider moving up a level but a good start.
Over a period of time you will accumulate a number of cashes, until you reach the stage where your bankroll is in excess of $200.00 and you start playing in the $8.00 + $0.80 games. Of course, if you came first or second in one of these lower tournaments, you would win $216.00 or $144.00 – sufficient to leap up a level immediately.
And so it continues – through the $10.00 + $1.00 and $20.00 + $2.00 multi table poker tournaments, until you are playing in the $100.00 + $9.00 games with prize money in the thousands.
Was it Mr Punch who said “That´s the way to do it”?
