Playing According to Your Bankroll

In poker, particularly NL Hold Em, the size of your stack should alter the way you play. Similarly, the size of your bankroll should alter your overall strategy for playing.

Game selection is the biggest thing your bankroll should dictate. Because of the nature of poker, you will lose. It is inevitable. You can play perfectly, and you can still lose. Sometimes it's just a hand and you recover, sometimes it is multiple hands over a session, sometimes it can be multiple sessions. You have to determine how much you are willing to lose on a given night or in a given sequence of sessions. If your bankroll is $5,000, you could play in a $1,000 game, but you can't lose 5 times. That puts a lot of pressure on you to play well, and it puts pressure on the cards to turn out well. A $5,000 roll at a $500 table means 10 losses, or half the pressure. At a $300 table, it's about 17 losing sessions. There is more of an opportunity to make money at larger tables. One hot streak of cards coupled with great play and your bankroll skyrockets. However, the cards cool off at the drop of a hat and without warning, and nobody plays perfectly all the time. You have to assess the risk you're taking and then go from there.

Your bankroll dictates your strategy for playing. If you have a $5,000 roll and you're playing at a $100 table, you can screw around, play pot odds and implied odds, take chances with big bluffs, and so on. However, if it is only $2,000, you have to tighten up and take fewer chances.

Poker is a war, your chips are your soldiers on the field. Your bankroll is your army as a whole. It's stupid to commit your entire army to one battle (See: Battle of the Bulge, Stalingrad, and Pharsulus). It is also stupid to have reckless strategies with a small army.

My style of poker, at the moment, is based on two men. Phil Hellmuth Jr. and Robert E. Lee. I use Hellmuth's top 10 strategy for hand selection, and his willingness to fold, even if he might be winning, and his conservativeness without the nuts.

Robert E. Lee, as you may or may not know, was the commanding General of the Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War. His army was almost always outnumbered by Union forces, and always with inferior supplies. However, he was able keep his army intact for 4 years of warfare and came very close to winning the war at the battle of Gettysburg. He picked his spots and his strategy was to maintain the survival of his army. He rarely went into battle unless he had an edge. Of course, he and the Confederacy lost the war, but a great deal of that was due to the way Gettysburg turned out. Lee took a gamble and went on the offensive against an enemy with superior ground. He could have forced the enemy to engage him in better spot, but he went for the killer blow instead of trying to set up the perfect situation.

A really good player at Turning Stone once said to me "You're a really good player, but I never see you with a huge stack of chips, it's always like $150 or $200." And he's right, I rarely have monstrous stacks of chips unless I've been playing all day and all night. There's a reason for that.

I rarely play hands that win big pots. My goal, because my bankroll isn't high enough to absorb many losses, is to win a sizable pot an hour. Big pots are great, and I take them when I can. The pots I win though, are typically mid-sized ones, somewhere between $15 and $40 at a $100 table. My bankroll simply can't afford to take steady streams of losses with suited connectors and low pocket pairs. I've tried that style, and the pots I won were larger, but I was also losing a lot of bets and calls. A bad week or two of that and my bankroll was hurting.

If my bankroll were higher, let's say around $3,000 or $4,000, I'd probably take more chances at the $100 table, and I'd definitely move up to $200. When my bankroll gets up to around $10,000, watch the fuck out cuz I'm going to be playing a Ulysses S. Grant style of poker at the lower tables. However, I'll still play Robert E. Lee poker at the higher ones.

Unfortunately, Phil Hellmuth has busted out of the WSOP Main Event. The crapshoot will continue without him.