Poker Articles

Moving Up
by Lou Krieger
Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Ambitious to take on a bigger poker game? The limits you've been at may be limiting you indeed. But consider some of the factors of your playing ability and your bankroll.

Poker is one of the only occupations I know where you don't have to wait for the boss to give you a raise and a promotion when you feel ready to step out and step up. As a poker player, you can decide to promote yourself whenever you believe you're ready and able to handle the challenges of a new and presumably tougher game.

If you want to earn more money and believe you can handle the additional risks that go hand-in-hand with the increased rewards, you don't have to wait until the boss calls you into the office for your annual performance appraisal review and the salary change that usually accompanies it. Where your poker career is concerned, you're the boss, promotions are there forthe taking, and all you have to do is reach for it. But the new job always involves playing in tougher games against better opponents, and because the stakes are higher, the risks are greater. Poker is a little different from working at a conventional job. In the workaday world, a salary increase usually accompanies a promotion, but when you're a poker player there's no guarantee that a promotion to bigger stakes and the tougher games that generally go alongwith it means you'll earn more money.

Conventional poker wisdom suggests that 300 big bets are needed to sustain a winning player through the predictable peaks and valleys at any given limit. If your game of choice is $3/$6, you'll need a bankroll of $1800; but if you prefer poker at betting limits of $20/$40, you should have $12,000 set aside for nothing but poker. But this is an estimate, not a formula, and whether it's enough depends on a variety of factors.

First, 300 big bets will never be enough if you're not a winning player. Neither will 500. If you can't beat the game you play, but you persist in playing, you'll need a bankroll big enough to outlast your life expectancy or you'll eventually go broke.

Second, if you're good enough to pound the game to the tune of two big bets per hour (conventional wisdom suggests that a solid professional poker player will win approximately one big bet per hour -- except in the highest limit games, where the expectation is significantly less than one big bet per hour), you won't need nearly as much as you would if you're just managing to keep your head above water by winning an average of only one-fourth of a big bet per hour.

Third, if the game is very volatile you'll need a bigger stake to outlast the game's swings and reversals of fortune. In tamer games, where raising is rare and most players call far too deeply into hands they decide to play, you can probably get by on a smaller bankroll. A game's texture goes a long way toward determining the amount you'll need to sustain yourself. Themore volatile the game, the more money you'll need to outlast the game's inherent variance, and other than finding a tamer game, there's no way around this.

Fourth, if you're a recreational player who supplements his playing stake with other income, you really don't need any more of a bankroll than you'd bring to the table for your buy-in on any given night, and that's only about 25 big bets. After all, you can always infuse your playing stake with discretionary income, just as you'd fund any other hobby.

Remember, it's not critical to be a winning player. If poker is your hobby and you win a little, lose a little, but enjoy the game for its social and recreational benefits, and are willing and able to infuse your bankroll with income you've earned elsewhere, there's nothing wrong with that. Estimates that I've read suggest that 90% of poker players fall into this category.

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If you're new to the game and aspire to become a winning player, yet you realize that Rome wasn't built in a day, there's no cause for worry either. Even if you have to underwrite poker losses for a year or so, as long as your game is improving and you honestly believe yourself to be on the road to becoming a winning player, the money you're losing now can be viewed as an investment in your future career as a poker player instead of the cost of having a good time playing poker.

Like the price paid for buying poker books, taking poker lessons, and putting your time in at the table in order to turn the knowledge you've gained from study and lessons into practical know-how, making an investment in yourself should be self-amortizing in the long run. When your skill level improves to the point where you can beat the game on a regular basis, the money you invested to raise your game to that level will be returned to you many times over.

If you're doing well at your current limits and are considering moving up, why not take a shot at a bigger game? Here's the best way to do it: Many of your regular, everyday opponents also play one notch above or below their limit of choice some of the time, depending on whether a game looks soft, how well funded they are, and depending on more prosaic matters too; such as where the open seats are.

My advice is to wait until you notice a bigger game populated with a few players you know from your regular game and take a shot at it. That way at least some of those opponents won't be a mystery to you, and this approach should help you navigate your way into a comfort zone at those bigger limits.

And if you take a shot a few times and figure you have the right stuff to beat the bigger game, it's probably time to promote yourself. Whynot? You've earned it!