Bankroll Management "Why"
I know there's no shortage of bankroll management posts, but I think most of the focus is on the "what is it" or "what rules should I follow" and sometimes, "here's why I'm not going to follow bankroll management, why I'm the one guy who can get away with it, and can I have your support". However, there are not enough posts that I see on the "why". I wanted to start a thread about why players should be more apt to follow bankroll management and less apt to take shots or act with total reckless abandonment. If nothing else, it will be a nice frame of reference for me to point to for different posts where I want to extol the virtues of bankroll management, but not use too many words doing in the process. Feel free to add your own ideas or discuss further. If there are links to similar posts that I've missed, post those here, too and we'll try to consolidate.
1. Dealing with Variation. It's been said many times, but the most obvious reason for why you want to follow bankroll management is because poker is a game of variation and probability and even though we play for the good times, we have to be able to withstand the bad times. To withstand it, you just need two things: (1) Be a winning a poker player @ the level and peers you're playing against and (2) Have enough in your bankroll to withstand reasonable variation.
If you are not a winning poker player, there is no amount of money that can save you. Your bankroll will fluctuate up and down very similar to a winning player, but long term you will lose more than you will gain, and you will lose it all eventually if you play long enough and don't get better. In terms of results, poker is a very poor short term game, but very accurate long term game. The better player will always come out ahead in the long run. Again, you just have to play enough - thousands and thousands of hands.
Assuming you are a winning player, you will still lose through bad luck, bad decisions, better opponents, and a myriad of other reasons. Even if you always played against players worse than you or always made good decisions or even if you always made THE perfect poker decision every time, you would still lose sometimes. The only way you could not lose is if you could ALSO predict the future. So, keep in mind that even with X-ray vision that allowed you to see all the hole cards, unless you also knew what cards were coming, you will ALWAYS lose at some point. And if you can lose once, you could lose more than once, and something not likely, but still possible could happen and you could lose your entire bankroll. But, by following sound money management principles, we can reasonably overcome these uncertainties.
There's enough posts out there about what a good bankroll is to withstand natural variation, so I won't delve much into that. But, in a nutshell, for no limit, I strongly believe in having at least 30 buy-ins before moving up a level. Not 15 to 20 or even 29 - the whole 30. With bankroll management, always error to caution because your bankroll is your poker life's blood. DO NOT act carelessly with your poker life - give it the attention, priority, and respect it deserves. If you don't move up a level when you have 30 buy-ins, make it because you're waiting to do so @ 40 or 50. Once you start @ a level, you can continue playing at that level unless you lose enough to fall to 20 buy-ins at which point you should drop a level of play. Also, never put more than 10% of your entire roll into play through buy-ins @ multiple tables. Have a stop loss in place such that you will not allow yourself to lose more than 5% of your entire bankroll in one day.
2. Poker Mindset - It's just chips. Reason "why" # 1 is the most obvious and usually where the discussion stops, but bankroll management gives you so much more freedom and chance to enhance your abilities. Making good decisions is the foundation of being a strong, successful poker player. But, having a clear mind and making sound decisions is easier said that done. Once real money is introduced into the equation, people start to react and behave differently than they might otherwise. Some people play more greedy and aggressive, some play more passive and scared, some try to get fancy or tricky, and the list goes on. Some people can handle calling an all-in bet for $5 because it's just five bucks, but $100 could pay my cable bill for the month, and $1000 could pay my rent. No matter who you are, at some point, money starts to matter and it will affect your decision making. I know it's happened to me and I see it routinely happen to others at amounts that don't even seem that significant.
However, when you follow bankroll management, you literally have no reason to worry as far as the money goes. Bankroll management was designed so that you don't have to worry about your money. It's already been taken care of. You just follow the rules and play the best poker you can play. You aren't buying in for $5 or $50 or $500. You're buying in for 100 big blinds and when you first arrive @ a new level, you have a bankroll of at LEAST 30 of them with nothing to worry about because even if you lose 10 in a row, you'll drop down a level that you KNOW you can beat and build it back up again. Proper bankroll management allows you to look at the chips the same whether it's a $2 buy-in or a $200 buy-in. The theory of poker and how you should fight for those blinds is the same no matter what - only your opponents change.
Again, this may at times be easier said than done once you reach certain levels, but in truth, it's only different if you allow it to be.
3. Poker Mindset - I have discipline. Even more important than knowing poker and playing good poker in my opinion is having good discipline. You will be tested @ the poker table in more ways than you can imagine. You will get sucked out on, you will miss draws, you will get cooler hands like your QQ spiking a set on the flop and villain KK flopping his set on the turn (happened to me less than a month ago), you will have villains needle or berate you, and so much more. To be successful at this game, you have to develop the discipline to handle those situations and not let it affect your game. So, if you can't even have the discipline to stick to bankroll management, what chance are you going to have to deal with all the other stuff that will happen? Once you start breaking bankroll management, before you even sit down at the table, you've basically admitted to yourself that you don't have any discipline. It applies to ALL bankroll management decisions: playing under your roll, taking shots, putting too much money in play, and not heeding one day stop losses. Developing and maintaining discipline is an important "why" you want to follow bankroll management.
4. Poker Mindset - I believe in myself. Having confidence in poker is a slippery slope. You don't want too much of it or to lack too much either. I think that many people who don't follow bankroll management secretly or subconsciously don't believe they are good poker players. Because if they did, they would have no problem starting from the bottom following the rules knowing that they have the skills to basically skate to the top. Sure, there will be some bumps along the way because there always are, but if you are a winning player, it doesn't take long to move up. If you are a 10bb/100 or 4ptBB/100 winning player @ $2NL and start playing with a $60 roll @ just 200 hands per day Monday through Friday (1000 hands per week), you would hit $150 and ready to play $5NL in less than 6 months. Those are pretty conservative numbers and you also have the freedom to put in more hands and work on your game to improve your win rate to make it go faster if you like. By taking shots, you are basically saying that you don't have confidence in yourself or the system.
5. Poker Mindset - I believe in myself, but I know I'm human. Lacking confidence will cause most players to play less than optimum, and so too will having too much confidence. Some players, ironically, usually the greenest of the green from what I've seen, think they're going to waltz into the poker scene and start taking money off the table like it's low hanging fruit. More times than not, if you play outside your roll, you'll quickly solve the "too confident" problem by going broke. This is negative reinforcement and far from optimal. By following bankroll management, you can constructively hone, build, and assess realistic confidence levels. By starting from the bottom, beating levels, and playing within your means, you approach poker from a fun perspective, the way it was meant to be, as a game. Poker is a game and should be fun. Even if it becomes a job or pays the bills, the fun factor should stay constant. By starting online @ $2NL or in a home game for a $20 buy-in, it's like inserting a quarter into a video game and seeing how high you can get the score up. If you're truly God's gift to poker, you will find yourself blazing a trail through each level leaving fish and nits in your wake and blinded by your glory. If not, then you'll probably find yourself like the other 99% of the poker population grinding it out, but still having fun, learning, and growing each step of the way whether those steps are up or down. Don't forget to have fun.
Summary
To summarize, the benefits of following sound bankroll management are far reaching and it is something to embrace, not ignore. It will enhance your success, not hold you back. Poker is a game where only 40% of its players will ever make money in the long term. We know the bad players go broke, but surprisingly many good ones do too. Stu Ungar is widely regarded as one of the best no limit players who ever lived, but also one of the worst at handling money. There are stories of many well known pros living today who are losers long term because they are not disciplined with money. This alone is pretty convincing evidence that bankroll management is required for success as no amount of skill can overcome it.
