How big of a bankroll should you have?

Ok... I'm new to this, could someone help me out please. I recently read "Small Stakes Hold'em: Winning Big With Expert Play." I have played entirely online, specifically partypoker. My results have varied greatly. Playing only two 3/6 tables, I have made as much as $400+ in two hours. Yet I'll turn around and lose all of that plus some during the span of several days. I understand that because poker is gambling, it will have "swings" for better or worse, irrelevant of one's playing style. So my question is this: assuming correct playing style and 3/6 tables online, how big can I expect these swings to be? Or, said another way, at what point can I know that it is my play, not my luck, that has caused me to lose (or gain)? How big of a bankroll is needed to compensate for luck?

[Evan]

300 big bets is the rule of thumb around here. Most people like to have more. It's all about how much risk you can tolerate and whether or not the money is replenishable.

[Harv72b]

Assuming that you are a winning player, 300 big bets for the level you are playing is generally considered to be large enough to protect against risk of ruin during downswings. That's not always true--downswings of more than 300 BBs are very possible no matter how good you are, but they are rare. Of course, if you are not a winning player, then no amount of money is a big enough bankroll.

Most people will tell you that it takes tens of thousands of hands to determine whether or not you are truly a winning player at your current limit. Statistically speaking, this is pretty close to the truth. My personal opinion is that new players go through three distinct phases: invincibility (when they first start, post a few big winning sessions, and suddenly think they're the next Phil Ivey), uncertainty (when they encounter the inevitable losing sessions, and suddenly start to wonder whether or not they are really a winning player), and finally, cognizance (when they realize that win rates don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and that whether or not you're a winning player, and how big a winning player you are, depends far more on your opponents than it does on you).

Welcome to the forums. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[SNOWBALL138]

Hi. You should try to use the search function. However, if you can't get it to work you can buy one or more of the following books:

1. Gambling theory and other topics

2. Professional Poker by Mark Blade

3. Poker, Gaming and Life by David Sklansky

Here's a quick answer to your question though. The amount of money that you should have to play with to have a low risk of ruin is determined by 2 parameters. The first is your hourly rate or your number of big bets per 100 hands. The second is your standard deviation per hour or per 100 hands. If you buy pokertracker, you can get these numbers.

After you get these numbers, then you can begin to answer your question. Keep in mind that you need a large sample size to figure out your winrate and your standard deviation, with a much larger sample size for the former than the latter.

Here's an easy formula for figuring out your bankroll requirements (9)(SD*SD)/(WR)(4)

That means you take your standard deviation and multiply it by itself, and then you multiply it by nine. You get X.
Then you take your winrate and multiply it by four. You get Y. You take X and divide it by Y to get the number of big bets you will need for your bankroll.
Keep in mind that when you are plugging in your SD and WR numbers that they need to be uniformly either per 100 hands or per hour. You can't have one be per 100 and then the other be per day or something like that.

Most people that you ask will say "300 big bets," which is actually the number for a player other than yourself. The number may also apply to you, but don't bet on it.

[jason_t]

299,792,458

[shant]

75,000