bankroll strategy

Please let me know what you think of this bankroll strategy (Play on internet).


0.5/1 to $200, start again with $100 if bust


1/2 to $500, back to 0.5/1 at $100


2/4 to $2000, back to 1/2 at $400


3/6 to $5000, back to 2/4 at $1000


5/10 to $12000, back to 3/6 at $3000


10/20 to $24000, back to 5/10 at $6000


20/40 to $50000, back to 10/20 at $12000


Turn pro!


I skipped some limits in between for simplicity, but do you get my drift? I came up with this on the basis of bankroll rquirements I read in this forum. A sensible player would obviously be better starting with a 2/4 bankroll if time was a factor, but in theory it would be hard to go broke this way.

your larger stakes games have such a high bankroll for them if you lose with that much its impossible in my mind that you can beat that limit or game where it took place in . and your small limits are a little small but would give you a good idea if you can win in that situation. but remember at small limits some games because of the excessive rake are almost unbeatable. i like to use 300 big bets as a good guide to judge if you can beat the game. though thats not the amount to ascertain if you can win for sure but somewhere you have to begin to question your ability to win in a spot.

Why not escalate the upper limits but reduce the drop backs.


Make it 3/6 at 1500 but drop it back at 1200 to 2/4 and 1/2 at 800.


In any event if you are lsing enough to drop from 5000 to 1000 there is likely something else besides variance at work.

Thanks for the replies. This is purely theoretical at the moment, but the reason I gave so much room for error was for the purpose of determining if a particular limit was beatable, ie, enough to lose 300BB after stepping up to a limit (at the higher end). After losing 300BB at 5/10, it would be back to 3/6 until you have enough to lose another 300BB at 5/10, until you beat it. It would also take a very long time, and so will probably remain theoretical. I would like to hear how different people manage their bankrolls - whether they just stick to one limit and go to the bank when they are stuck, or generally go down in limits. I imagine it would be hard for someone to go down from 20/40 to 3/6, especially after losing. I built my 2/4 bankroll, now at $2500, from a single $50 deposit, and getting lucky on 0.5/1, 1/2 tables. But I doubt that if I ran into bad luck / bad play and lost BR, I would be content playing 0.5/1. I know this is all small fry to most of you, but it's all relative.

Two comments.


1. I am using an $1800 BR...(currently at $1150) - to assess my skill. I'm playing 3-6 and will continue to do so in order to beat the unbearable rake at the 2-4 games in my casino - as I reach the 300 BB mark, I will consider upping limits - (2400 for a 4-8 game). But as far as I'm concerned, You could be just shooting yourself in the foot at those LL games. I've never played the .50/1.00 games before, but the variance has to be unbelievable - like a play money game.


2. I'm an independant network contractor. This is what I do...and I'm self employed and I know it well. Knowing this and knowing networks...I would never subject my bankroll to high-limit internet play. I honestly believe that if I wanted to...I could hook up 2-3 profiles and play 2-3 players at a table with different ISP's/IP addresses. And you know what, that means others can do it..and it does happen.


You get close enough to play professional...you'll want to be moving to poker rooms, my friend.

****2. I'm an independant network contractor. This is what I do...and I'm self employed and I know it well. Knowing this and knowing networks...I would never subject my bankroll to high-limit internet play. I honestly believe that if I wanted to...I could hook up 2-3 profiles and play 2-3 players at a table with different ISP's/IP addresses. And you know what, that means others can do it..and it does happen. ****


And how would you make money like that without a) immediately alerting everyone to what you were doing, or b) already being a good enough player to beat the game straight up?

This is annoyingly long, sorry about that. You've been warned.


This is just my view and shouldn't be taken as dicta for anything in particular, but here goes.


Throughout my life, I've associated with people of most, if not all, social classes in the United States and abroad. Among these, I've found people who's primary motivation seems to be the breaking of rules just to get away with it. Sometimes they make claims of a philosophical basis for the rules being somehow wrong, other times they make a case for their being a "better" set of rules if only the first ones could be shown to be bad.


I saw this in the Army with people stealing military supplies just because they could. (Exactly how many PRC-77 radios do you have at home and how many batteries do you need for them?) I saw it at the WTO riots in Seattle where the Oregon Anarchist Coalition (think on that for a minute, a governing body for Anarchists) came to Seattle solely to sew dissent and foment riot. No particular political or economic views on the WTO, they just wanted to see if they could start a riot. As it was, they were inept so things turned out much better than they could.


The internet is a wonderful thing. It interacts with so many facets of our life, it's honestly impossible to list them all. In many of those facets, there are rules. ISPs have rules about not posting kiddie porn, some have rules about spamming, others belong to Government agencies or big corporations with their full rations of rules, regulations and statutes. One of the things offered by the internet is also anonymity. This comes in degrees ranging from simple pseudonyms on e-mail lists to full fledged remote firewalls, encrypted rotation schemes for data switching in realtime all the way up to dedicated, isolated systems that require a physical transport of data to port it from the system to a network.


We have a way of interacting with rules-making organizations that can provide near perfect anonymity and we also have a group within our society that holds the breaking of rules and conventions as their highest achievement. Some of these people are spammers, other's are televangelists and still others get their jollies out of writing viruses. (Code Red, anyone?)


Now enter the online Poker world. Rules? Yep, plenty of those; both intrinsic to the game and to the internet as a communication method? Anonymity? Yep, not only desired if you want to crack the system but in some ways, "lying about who and what you are" is part and parcel to the game itself. Essentially immune to legal action? BINGO!!!! Herein lies the rub. Let's take a server, put it in Costa Rica, route it through the uplink center in Guiana as well as the fallback backbone routing centers in Mexico City, Grand Cayman and Lima. Now let's bounce that data off of satellites owned by the US, France, India, China, Japan, Pakistan, the European Union, Russia and a dozen other nations and private organizations. Now let's imagine those satellites are controlled from an equally diverse number of ground stations.


Now let's get back to poker which is, as we all know, a collection of base and debauched people anyway. Online gambling is illegal or, according to the fundocrats and christicans it damn well should be. The data itself originates in a foreign nation and only enters an individual player's nation for the last hundredth of its travel. Oh, another thing about Poker? Money. Who'd a thunk it, Poker involving money.


We've just designed a system that is nearly ideal for the misuse and illegal interactions of the group of our society that have more interest in breaking rules than in maintaining them. Uhoh... people who'd hack a poker site, develop colluding player groups with disparate ISPs and routing data, people who'd do it just for the thrill of screwing with another person's rules? Yepper. And they can make money doing it.


I sat down and worked out about a dozen methods for changing the personal expectation of a player in online poker games. I'm not a computer-guy(tm), I was just bored and wanted to see how many I could think up in the time it took me to unlock the front door. I came up with about a dozen as I said.


So the short answer is, someone would do it because they could. Because they could screw with someone else. Because they want to break the rules. Because they could make money before they got caught. Fill in the next reason...


This is why I don't play online. I've met too many people who were simply rotten and the online world allows too many opportunities for these folks to get away with other people's money. Realistically, they can get their account frozen by the onlne game's server. How is a US national going to be prosecuted by someone soliciting a potentially illegal activity when that activity may, or may not, be taking place in any of a dozen foreign nations? Is the hacker civilly liable for his actions? Probably, in Costa Rica.

First, I think questions like these should be on the internet forum. I know the signal to noise ratio is crappy over there, but if more posts like these went up, who knows, it might start a positive chain reaction.


That said, let me suggest a different approach. Tie your limit to your results. I think you owe it to yourself to do a little self tutoring on the statistics of bankroll management. Because the bottom line is there is no one correct answer to eternal twin questions of "how much do I need" and "what limit should I play". Every choice entails a (hopefully small) chance of going broke. Play too big, and your chance of busting out grows to certainty. Play to small, and you aren't getting a good return on your invested money or skill.


So take some time, and learn why you risk is intimately tied to your earn and variance. And then maybe you'll agree with me that for a winning player, 300 BB is too conservative a BR for small online limits.


The reason is simply this, in online poker, you can almost instantaneously jump to a smaller limit. This contrasts with real life, where the rake gets proportionally higher as you move down, and in many local rooms there aren't 9 limits to choose from. Now granted, with higher proportional betting, you will be moving down often, perhaps 40% of your moves will be downward, and 60% will be upwards. But the exponential growth rate of your bankroll will be higher.


There are some problems with this approach: it's difficult to account for the fact that your win rate will be different at different games, and it takes a long time for an estimated win rate to converged to a "true" value. But I think trying to account for these difficulties with your own judgement and decisions has some real benefits. First, it makes those inevitable bad streaks seem less like thunderbolts of judgement by the poker gods and more like expected statistical behavior. Secondly, by learning to adapt bankroll strategy to different conditions, as opposed to trying to find the one true guideline, you're better prepared to make adjustments as game conditions and your risk tolerances change.


Some reccomended reading:


Gambling Theory and Other Topics by Mason Malmuth. Get it, it will pay for itself many times over.


http://www.jimgeary.com/poker/letters/KELLY.HTM A great rgp post by Tom Weideman, talking about kelly betting, a strategy I learned when I was a blackjack player.


http://www.dmtc.com/tools/wt_kelly.html kelly from the perspective of horses.


Btw, I think your strategy is fine... you obviously aren't overbetting your bankroll by bumping up too fast, which is the only thing that almost guarentees long run failure. But I think you will really benefit by digging into the details.


All the best,


zooey

My only question is this: Do you have the patience to go basically 6 months of playing 40 hours a week to move up a level? If so, you're looking to turn pro around 2008 if you don't go back any levels.


This is all based on the very shaky assumption that you will beat the online games for atleast >1 SB an hour in every game you play. I think this assumption is most definately flawed.


I think you will hit learning curves b/w several of the levels and your win rate will not be what it will end up being when you've gotten used to the new style of play at each higher level.


I think a different approach would be to keep your day job and instead of plowing 100 bucks into .5/1, take shots at 3-6 or 5-10 tables that appear to be very good(loose passive). That way you can get lucky and hit 5-10 for a few hundred and then be playing 3-6 w/ a decent bankroll.


Otherwise - if you've got the patience for it all and the skill , I wish you the best of luck.

Thank you all for the thoughtful replies. I ordered "Theory of Poker" and quite a few others yesterday, get them in about a year.


Right now I only play 2/4 and plan to do so for the next year or so, then see where I go from there, and your comments wil certainly help me.

nt