Roy Cooke article in Card Player is wrong.

[Mason Malmuth]

Hi Tapirboy:

No. That's not correct. The total number of hands that you intend to play does not impact what your bankroll should be.

Best wishes,
Mason

[Mason Malmuth]

No. Again that has no effect.

But going down in stakes will reduce your required bankroll.

Best wishes,
Mason

[timprov]

[ QUOTE ]
Hi Tapirboy:

No. That's not correct. The total number of hands that you intend to play does not impact what your bankroll should be.

Best wishes,
Mason

[/ QUOTE ]

It most certainly does. This seems incredibly obvious to me. Your most extreme swings will have higher magnitude in ten million hands than ten thousand.

[Mason Malmuth]

Hi Tapirboy:

We're talking about bankroll needed to play. Assuming you're a winning player, the more hands you play the more money you should win. That negates the swings you are talking about. I suggest you give my book Gambling Theory and Other Topics a good read. All of this is covered in there.

Best wishes,
Mason

[stigmata]

The main confusion in this thread is the differeces between low-stakes and mid-high stakes. At the stakes Roy Cooke is playing, I think he is entirely correct.

Compare the presence of multi-tabling TAGs and the very aggressive nature of the Party 30/60 to some pretty soft B&M games. The winrate is far lower online, and the variance far higher. In fact, a 50% bigger bankroll for online may be somewhat conservative. I have seen the figure of 800BB bankroll for the Party 30/60 mentioned several times, but this would be excessive for many B&M games.

At the lower stakes online, you probably can get by with a similar bankroll to B&M -- the play is better online, but the rake isn't such a killer.

[TemetNosce]

Yep.

[timprov]

[ QUOTE ]
Hi Tapirboy:

We're talking about bankroll needed to play. Assuming you're a winning player, the more hands you play the more money you should win. That negates the swings you are talking about. I suggest you give my book Gambling Theory and Other Topics a good read. All of this is covered in there.

Best wishes,
Mason

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, your bankroll can remain relatively small as long as you never want the money for anything. You don't see the catch-22 in this? Treating poker as an end in itself is kind of silly.

[maxpowers21]

Live games tend to be much softer, basically more passive. Passive play decreases variance, because when you run bad you aren't being charged the maximum by aggresive opponents, and you're not losing the maximum when you charge your over aggresive opponets when they do draw out on you. EV/hand tends to be higher live because the competition is softer in general. This means you need a smaller bankroll requirement.

That being said, you can easily play 10 times as many hands one would be playing for any period of time in live play by instead playing online, and more then that depending on how many tables one plays. Which means that it can be very worth while, despite the obvious drawbacks.

Maybe that's why the games are so much tougher...at respective limits online.

[maxpowers21]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Hi Tapirboy:

We're talking about bankroll needed to play. Assuming you're a winning player, the more hands you play the more money you should win. That negates the swings you are talking about. I suggest you give my book Gambling Theory and Other Topics a good read. All of this is covered in there.

Best wishes,
Mason

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, your bankroll can remain relatively small as long as you never want the money for anything. You don't see the catch-22 in this? Treating poker as an end in itself is kind of silly.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't understand your statement from above. The point of the bankroll is to allow yourself no chance of losing the entirety of the bankroll. This is why you need a bigger bankroll to account for bigger swings. Because if you don't you have allowed yourself a chance to go broke simply by running bad.

[Mike Haven]

If you play one game of 10-20 let's agree you need a 6,000br, or a 300bbbr.

Whether you play this one game fast or slow is irrelevant; you still only need this 6,000br.

However, independently, each game you play needs this 6,000br, so if you played 4 tables at once and kept separate bankrolls for each game, for some strange reason, you would need a 24,000br in case each one of your games hit a major downslide at the same time.

Obviously, you don't really need to keep 4 separate bankrolls, because, in theory, you would have to reduce the number of games you were playing to 3 once your total br reduced to 18,000, and to 2 at 12,000, down to 1 at 6,000, to stay in line with standard br advice.

Working up the other way, as long as you know you should reduce to 1 game once your br has reduced to 6,000, then, in practice, it is alright to "push your luck" a little and play more than one game.

There is an exact mathematical way to work it out, but it is probably reasonable to say that a 100bb downturn on each table at once would be "unlucky", so, if you are playing four tables, with a view to reducing to 1 table in a "br emergency", a 4,000 + (4x2,000) = 12,000br should be safely sufficient.

That's a 600bbbr for a 10-20 4-tabler.

imo