Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

Hi,

I started playing poker in August and now I'm broke for the 2nd time. First I played Limit and made 400$ out of 0$. I did fairly well on Everests 1$/2$ tables but then lost most of the roll playing 2$/4$ and NL. Then I thought I like to learn NL which took me quite some time. I was doing fairly well, but couldn't resist playing 50$NL with a 200$ roll.

I) How do you resist the temptation playing above your roll?
II) What steps would you recommend limit-wise?

I'm taking a break reading HOH and Mastering NL by Fox. Next week I will deposit 500$ at pacific.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

My advice would be to not stress your progress.
There is no such thing as fast and easy money in poker.
I started in August with $2 and now have a bankroll of $175 playing .25/.50

I started at .05/.10 and worked my way up.

I know it's extremely slow, but I want to learn solid poker while building my BR. I have no rush at all.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

I think you need what (at least in religious circles) might be called an "accountability partner". Don't deposit $500 in Pac, because you won't need it for the limits you're going to play right now. Deposit $100, treat that as your bankroll, and don't let yourself near the other $400 until you've shown that you can manage the $100 well. Put the $400 somewhere -- I would say in escrow, but that's probably a bit much for such a small amount -- where you won't have ready access to it, and the person who controls it will make you give an accounting for how you've used the first $100.

Now, you don't have a $500; you have a $100 roll. If you're a winning limit player, you likely can play 5c/10c with no risk of ruin, so do so. (I'm going to talk in limit terms because you seem more sure of your play, and you should concentrate where you're most sure of your play. If you want to buy into the $10 max NL game on Pac for $1 or $2, as I'm doing to learn, then that's probably OK. But set strict boundaries -- no more than $20 of the $100 goes to NLHE, for example.) Play that until you're up $25.*

Now you have a $125 roll and another $400 on ice. You've shown you can be trusted not to dabble in higher limits so your accountability partner will free another $100. Now you have a roll $225 and can play 25c/50c if you're able to beat it. Repeat the process - go up 250 big bets ($125), show your numbers to your accountability partner, and now you're probably OK to release the last $300.

At this point you will be tempted to consider yourself "free" of accountability and go blow it all playing too high. DON'T! Continue to meet with this person and have them look over your shoulder.

A poker-knowledgeable person would be ideal for this role (no, i'm not going to pretend i could be that then scam you out of the $400!) but a spouse, parent, or good friend without poker knowledge can provide that portion. We'll provide the plan; their job is to print it out and make you stick to it.

*You haven't shown any data to support that you're a winning limit player, so I'm assuming you need to prove yourself still. Once you have such data you should share it with your accountability partner.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

It's very easy to blame bankroll mismanagement, but you don't have enough evidence that you are a winning player. If I had to guess, I'd say that is your main problem, that you are either a losing player or a marginal winner at $1-$2 and above.

Moving to Pacific may help, as the players there are terrible, much worse than on most sites at the same limits.

[ QUOTE ]

I) How do you resist the temptation playing above your roll?


[/ QUOTE ]
I've won so much at lower levels that playing at the highest level for which I might have the bankroll scares me. If you assume I have the skills for the higher games, then I have a bankroll for games 10 times as large as I play now. I'm sure I'm beating NL 200. I'm less confident about NL 400, and I'll wait to move up until I am sure.

[ QUOTE ]

II) What steps would you recommend limit-wise?


[/ QUOTE ]
If you read the microlimit forum, you'll see that some people recommend playing $0.10-$0.20 until you grow old, then $0.25-$0.50 until you die, at which point you can consider taking some shots at $0.50-$1. I think that's too slow, but you don't need to risk going broke.

Make sure you are a winning player. Get in the habit of winning, even if it means playing for pennies. Know which mistakes your opponents are making that you are exploiting. Then move up while maintaining that feeling of outplaying your opponents.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

you have no business playing no limit while learning. if you want to build a bankroll and be a winner you need to do alot of serious reading and thinking about the game. then you can play a little higher limit poker and have a chance. good luck.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

Thx for the replies so far.

My impression so far is that for learning NL I'll have to play NL.

Should I go on with Limit and switch to NL later on even if I want to be playing NL in the end? With what roll would you recommend a switch and to what limit? Maybe 1000$ / 50$NL? What about MTTs/SnGs? Should I consider playing other variants like stud after a few months?

I read SSHE for my Limit game. I will probably read WLLH by Jones, Supersystem II and TOP after the NL books I mentioned (HOH & Mastering NLHE).

What I didn't mention is that I'm going play up to 50h/week from now on. Playing is lots of fun, but I hope I can turn playing poker into a side-job.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

I would say that if you want to play NL, then thats where you should learn, and move up through the various limits. Start at the .5/.10 NL on stars and go from there. Don't move up until you have 20X the max buy-in for the next level. GL.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

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you have no business playing no limit while learning.

[/ QUOTE ]

In the age of micro-sit-and-go's and micro-buyin NL cash games, I don't see how this statement is self-evident. I value what Ray Zee has to say on the topic, but I'd like to see a well-reasoned explanation of why learning limit in order to learn NL is the way to go.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

Here is my shot at an explanation of the benefits of learning limit before NL:

-- You learn the value of hands and position and the drawbacks of being out of position that cannot be corrected with a shove
-- You learn discipline and patience in starting hand selection, or you go broke
-- You learn the art of post-flop play
-- You develop the ability to take a suckout
-- You learn how to read hands effectively
-- You learn how to evaluate other players and identify their weaknesses and develop plans for how to exploit them

While you can accomplish all of these things sitting down playing micro-NL-sng's, that format allows many beginning players to screw around for quite awhile without ever really learning much about poker. If it's a fun hobby good for them. They can continue to put in $x from every paycheck and have fun.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

[ QUOTE ]
While you can accomplish all of these things sitting down playing micro-NL-sng's, that format allows many beginning players to screw around for quite awhile without ever really learning much about poker. If it's a fun hobby good for them. They can continue to put in $x from every paycheck and have fun.

[/ QUOTE ]
You listed a number of good things to learn, but I don't see why you think they are learned more at limit than NL. Many people play limit badly for a long time, too. At every level, the average result is to lose.

NL has a much lower variance relative to a good player's win rate. That means that when you start to outplay your opponents, you get more rapid feedback, as you have far less frequent losing sessions.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

My experience is that switching from Limit to NL is very hard, because the second best hand loses so much. And I think that is the most eminent difference. I lost many buyins to learn to fold pretty good hands, whereas at Limit I got money from them.

In NL I had to learn about implied odds, traps, bluffing which all play a minor or no role in limit. The question would be how much these factors outweigh the things that RatFink mentioned one should learn from Limit. Probably it's very useful learning about position & preflop play first, before entering even micro NL cash games.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

[ QUOTE ]
It's very easy to blame bankroll mismanagement, but you don't have enough evidence that you are a winning player. If I had to guess, I'd say that is your main problem, that you are either a losing player or a marginal winner at $1-$2 and above.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I second this, although I sort of danced around that issue in my previous post by "gently suggesting" that you collect better data.

Don't you dare play anything about the nano-limits until you have a good sample showing you to be up several hundred big blinds over at least several thousands of hands. (Many would say tens or hundreds of thousands of hands -- I'm willing to cut back a little only because it's likely that anyone who has learned anything about poker can beat the nanos, so i'm predisposed to believe a smaller sample when the underlying assumption makes theoretical sense.)

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

I generally agree that limit is a good place to gain some fundamentals before moving to NL, but those benefits can be gained fairly quickly. Limit is also a good game to play if you find yourself tilting a lot at NL.

My principal argument to support this is that in a limit game, because you cannot "buy the pot" (and neither can anyone else for that matter) you have to learn to play the cards. You have to learn what makes a strong hand and what makes a weak hand. You have to learn what sorts of hands are worthy of a raise preflop - knowing full well that you will not be able to buy yourself out of a mistake in later rounds. You will also be able to learn to read other players better because you have less information to process. Finally, you will tend to see many more showdowns, so you will get to see more of what sorts of hands are likely to win and what sorts of hands are likely to wind up being second or third best - plus, you will be able to see your opponents's cards far more often, so you can more effectively analyse their play.

You can then take these concepts and effectively apply them to a NL game - as long as you understand the adjustments that have to be made to do so.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

After reading a number of good 2+2 books, and maybe some others too, spend the $60 and buy Poker Tracker (or some similar program), then install a heads up display like Poker Ace HUD.

At least if things go bad again, you can look at every hand you played, and look for leaks and trends with some detailed hand analysis. Having a record of wins and losses every session is an eye-opener. As for resisting moving up, if you focus on playing good, tight, ABC tight-aggressive poker, then you should see positive results in PT and have good, solid stats over 20K+ hands at your starting level. If you have good results, then you should have enough to make a move up and start over with a new PT database. Then move back down to regroup if you lose 5 or 10 buy-ins at that higher level to regroup and do some more studying and posting of your questionable hands and plays.

On line you can play a lot more hands, so you end up with a lot more opportunity to make good and bad decisions in a shorter period of time with less information then live (i.e. no "tells" or "reads" from a persons speech or body language). However, you can have stats and trends, both for yourself and other players.

Re: Broke again/ weak bankroll management
 

Thx. What is that Poker Ace HUD exactly? I'm still at Everest because Neteller takes ages and so I can't move to Pacific and use PT.