[MaxPower]

I believe that the 300BB figure comes from one of Sklansky's essays where he estimates that based upon some assumptions (I cannot remember which book it is in). I also don't know what risk of ruin he was assuming. I think this was meant to be just a helpful heuristic, but it has morphed into some kind of fact.

The problem is that the assumptions that Sklansky made in that essay do not necessarily apply to every winning player in every game at every limit. Still people continue to believe that 300BB is some kind of magic number. For an skilled player in a soft game they probably need much less. For a very good player in the tough games we find online, we might need more.

To really know our bankroll requirements we would have to use Mason's or BruceZ's formulas. In order to use them we need to know our win rate, which of course we won't know when we are moving up to a new limit and can't even estimate accurately until we have a ton of hands/hours.

So I guess what Sklansky was tyring to do was to provide rule of thumb to use.

I also don't think it is that big of a deal to work off a small bankroll and occasionaly go broke. Presumably a winning player has some savings or assets that he can dip into or could borrow a stake from another winning player. Many of us are conservative and don't want to do that, but there is nothing wrong with it.