[AeonBlues]

Mason Malmoth lays down the complex math on this subject in his book "Gambling Theory and Other Topics"

JayP was right when he said it depends a lot on style. And here's why: Your banroll requirement is determined by your hourly rate, and "standard deviation". Standard Deviation is the amount you can expect to win or lose in 1 hour. Think of how much money you would win in your best hour, and how much money you will lose in you worst. Average them, and bingo, your standard deviation. So you can see, that players that are really tight, have a lower deviation, and players that gamble it up, need a higher bank roll. Well, I went over my #'s with a friend who has a degree in math, and we came up with this. I play the $100 buy in NL games, and I make about $15 per hour, per table. My standard deviation is about $250. We kinda haggled over this, since a really bad hour, I'm stuck $300, and a really good hour, I'm up 4 to $500. Malmoth says that most players don't know their standard deviation, and I beleive that, cause you need to keep very acurate records to make a good determantion.

So anyway, I think my NL style leans more towards promoting smaller fluctuations, becaue I bet my strong hands very agressivly, and only ocasionaly over be my marginal hand, too keep my opponets guessing. Anyway, we settled on $4,000 for a 100% success rate. In other words, with a 4k bank, I should never go broke. If I was playing the $25 buy in, I would need a 1k bank. Now, you don't need that much if your lively hood doesn't depend on you not going broke. If I had another source of income I could work with a 3k bank, with about a 90% success rate, and a 2k bank with about 80%.

Mind you, all this is to the best of my understanding, and I'm no math expert.

AeonBlues