Bad Beats Pt. 4: Bankroll Management

If you are playing above your bankroll, bad beats are more likely to affect you. If you save money all year to play exactly one poker game, the Main Event at the World Series of Poker, then suffer a bad beat in the first hour of the tournament, you are going to relive that moment for a very long time. It will affect your approach to poker for years.

Think back to our blackjack dealer example from part one of this series. The casino has an enormous bankroll. If you win fifty hands in a row at $100 blackjack, the amount is insignificant to them. Certainly management will not be panicking or changing their playing styles (like poker players on tilt do). If you are dealt 13 against the dealer's ten, hit for 15, hit again for 21 to beat the dealer's 20, you have just laid a bad beat on the house by winning as a huge underdog. The house won't go on tilt, though. Your $100 win is virtually nothing to them.

Size of Your Bankroll

So how does sound bankroll management help poker players avoid the tilt from bad beats? If you have a million-dollar bankroll, and play $1/2 limit holdem, or $200 buy in no limit holdem, a few losses are insignificant to you, money-wise. Your own bad decisions might disappoint you, or a short-term run of bad luck may bring you down, but you have no financial worries. This is obviously an extreme example of bankroll management.

The other extreme of bankroll utilization is much more common, that of players risking significant portions of their bankroll on one cash game or tournament. If more than ten per cent of your bankroll is at risk in a poker game, you are highly likely to be negatively affected by the fortunes of the cards.

Here's an even further extreme: you have $110 in your bankroll. You enter five $22 online poker tournaments, playing simultaneously. You play fairly well through the middle stages, building average stacks in each of the five. In tournament one, you take a bad beat when you call an all-in with pocket kings, and watch as his 77 spikes a fourth diamond on the river to knock you out. In the second, you go all-in with AK, get called by 99, and are out when your hand doesn't improve.

What's your state of mind? Twice you got the money in, once as a huge favorite, and once in a good situation (but slight underdog), but you lost big in both. Now you're going to do one of two things in your remaining three tournaments:

1. Play very tight, trying to avoid risky coin flips, and find yourself blinded into submission

2. Go on tilt, cursing your bad luck, and make negative expectation plays because you're out of control.

Obviously, neither are conducive to long-term success, and yes, playing too tight can be a manifestation of tilt. The more of your bankroll is at risk, the more susceptible you are to tilt (and obviously bad beats are a common cause of tilt). Play within your bankroll, and the bad beats are relatively meaningless, and you will continue to play well in future games.

What Should Your Bankroll Be?

So how do we define a bankroll to avoid tilt? Well, the larger the better, but the $1 million example for $200 buy ins might be a little extreme. We want to play stakes high enough that there is incentive to win, but low enough that our bankroll can withstand a little variance (short-term bad luck).

One final factor affecting bankroll and tilt is the importance of the money. If a recreational player maintains a separate bankroll from their living expenses, and that bankroll is small compared to their net worth, they are less susceptible to bankroll tilt. If a professional poker player does not have several months' living expenses set aside outside their bankroll, they are putting too much pressure on themselves to win this session, and are more likely to tilt.

Playing at stakes high enough to be challenging but low enough to have tolerable risk is a challenge. Finding the sweet spot between too low and too high can mean real success as you are able to play your best game all the time.