Please Help: Bankroll management-1st year of Poker and STUCK.

[Wayfare]

Ok, first off if you are going to be playing low limit, your forgot "Small Stakes Hold Em" (SSHE) in your reading list. You need to throw out all those other books for .5/1, except theory of poker and SSHE. And when you read it, understand it. Don't just read it. I have read it twice and still do not understand it. Every single piece of info you take away from that book adds to your winrate.

Also, from reading your post on the mid-high stakes NL forum that you are sort of "iffy" on details. You should not be iffy on details while playing poker. You need to memorize the odds, especially at limit, and learn how to effectively count outs. This relates back to SSHE and actually understanding it.

About being stuck, it is very obvious why you are so: you are playing way over your head. It seems that you need to go back to fundementals and really learn how to play, rather than just "thinking" you know. Your tendencies indicate your are very prone to tilt, which is not a good way to be. You will have to work hardest on overcoming this.

Next, about the bankroll: You absolutely must not feel like every session you have needs to be a winning one. This relates back to the tiltibility that you displayed earlier. Moving way up in limits while you are on tilt to "make it back" is probably the worst decision you can make at that time. If you are beating the game, you will win money in the long term. You do not need to (in fact you definately shouldn't) wildly switch limits in order to make money. You need to adapt a set of strategies for your particular limit and then stick to them, adjusting and analyzing on the way. I know people say it a lot, but poker is one long session!!! You cannot play optimally if you do not adapt this mentality.

In fact, you don't really seem to understand what a bankroll is. A bankroll is a sum of money that is designed to accomodate the swings inherent in playing poker while minimizing the chance of "ruin." There is a lot of math involved in this (Brownian motion with expected drift?), but there is one important rule that you need most at the moment:

1: No matter how big your bankroll is, you will go bust if you are a losing player.

So for a losing playing the bankroll term is irrelevent. You have not proven that you can beat consistently one single limit, but are starting over at .5/1 and going to try to work your way up. This might be ok for you, but I find grinding out three dollars every two hours super-boring. I suggest freeing up a little more money, moving up, and trying to play one table (maybe two tables) correctly. Trying to multi table should only be started once you have your game down. You have admitted that this is not the case. Also, you said in your first post that you are going to play .5/1, but you have violated your own rule on the first day by playing 1/2. Not a good indication.

I would go back and really understand SSHE, effectively "forget about" the 5k you are stuck, and start over on a new bankroll. That is not what you are doing -- in fact it is very far from it. As long as you cannot free yourself from the notion that you are "stuck", you will have a very difficult time becoming unstuck.

Also, when you are posting on a forum, especially when you are new, be really careful who you mess with. Making fun of TheBruiser on your first day is a terrible idea. Alienating the regulars is probably one of the most -EV moves you can make here. In fact, dont take offense to this, but it would probably be better for you to refrain from posting at all in the "high" stakes forums. Study them first and then only add to them when you have played the games in question or have something really valuable to add.

[GameTheory]

Well, back when I used to play NL at the 3/6 and 2/4 on Stars(before I crapped my 5k BR away at the 5/10NL), I played with "TheBruiser" Several times. I don't know if you've played with him before, but he's quite rude, and gets immensly irate when you put a beat on him. Thus the hostility, and the sarcasm when he though that NL ability automatically translates into LIMIT success. It obviously does not work that way. So, just ignore my sarcasm to Bruiser. The contrast in post counts is irrelivant.
I decided to start at 1/2 instead of .5/1.

I will pick up SSHE, because literally Everyone has recomended it.

[Wayfare]

No matter what history you guys have, no one other than you knows it, and it comes off looking really bad. Perceptions > reality on these boards.

Also, you asked about how we became winning players, so I'll chime in with a short version of my story:

I started playing two and a half years ago, during sophmore year at Princeton. The game was originally $25 buy in at .25/.5, but morphed into a super deep stacked monster slowly but surely populated by very good players. While I was definately pretty fishy early, playing with these players helped my game immensely. Many of these players are found on these boards (scrub, edtost, drpublo, and others), and many play professionally or high limit now. I have never really had ambitions other than to make a couple thousand on poker every year (other than when I play in the world series and win it all of course), so I have played my first year online trying to develop a good strategy for beating the $25/$50 max on party. These games are ridiculously easy, but playing optimally never is. I have pretty much perfected the technique, and occasionally make forays into 1-2 live and the like. However, I like intellecualizing the game probably more than playing it, and the time on these boards probably does more for my game than anything else.

[Al Schoonmaker]

N/M

[Goodie54]

I don't want to mislead the original poster, but this advice is overly cautious and may be detrimental to the poster's evolution into a winning player. 50/1.00 is never going to teach you the principles that a winning 10-20 player needs to master.

50 thousand hands is way too many and I believe this person needs to move up quicker. Try the bigger games when a bankroll becomes available and keep reading this forum and anything you can to improve your game.

Keep working, you'll get there.

Peace

Goodie