Cash Game Bankroll Management
Big Idea: Bankroll management is just as important, if not more important than your lineup construction.
Bankroll management in Pot Limit Omaha is one of the most overlooked aspects of the game. Because PLO is a fast paced “action game” it often attracts gamblers and adrenalin junkies who are more interested in the possibility of getting lucky and making lots of money fast than protecting themselves against the possibility of a bad run of cards from the poker gods. This rule refers to a bankroll strategy that puts 80 percent of your money for the week in cash games (50/50s, double ups and head-to-heads) and 20 percent of your weekly money in high volatility, large-field tournaments like GPPs and qualifiers, with your total amount of money in play for the week never exceeding 10 percent of your bankroll. Managing a bankroll carefully is a vital skill for a successful player to learn, no matter at what level you play the game. Here are some pointers on bankroll management, which will help ensure poker is an enjoyable as well as profitable pastime.
- The best poker bankroll management strategy for beginners is to have 50 buyins for any limit you are playing. Experienced poker players can get by with a bankroll of 30 buyins. And for professional poker players I recommend using a bankroll management strategy of 100 buyins for any limit you are playing. There is a lot more to it than this though.
- The swings in the bankroll are not as big, so you can risk more of your bankroll on anyone slate and not kill yourself. It is not uncommon for a cash game player to be risking 10% of their bankroll on any given NFL slate if they play just the main slate each weekend.
Bankroll management is like the foundation of your house. It must be rock solid or the whole structure is going to come crashing down. Proper bankroll management is going to allow you to stay in the game and grow your bankroll incrementally.
Too many DFS players neglect bankroll management as a skill that they need to improve upon or master. Everyone is focused on projections or lineup construction and very little focus is put on bankroll management. It is fairly safe to assume that DFS’s best players are the ones who are best at bankroll management. They have a plan and stick to it each night. The good news is that I am going to lead you through a very simple process to streamline bankroll management. The difficult part is going to be sticking to the plan each night, even on nights that you lovveee your lineup.
Before we begin talking about specific strategies, it is important to note that when I say bankroll, I am talking about your DFS bankroll, not your life savings or family’s bread money. It is important to have money set aside specifically for DFS.
Now that we got that out of the way. The simplest way to approach BM is the 80/20/10 rule. This means that you play no more than 10% of your bankroll (I suggest closer to 5%). The next step is to divide up your bankroll for the day into cash games (80%) and tournaments (20%). You need to play with the percentages so that it suits your game, but that is a good general rule of thumb to use when starting out.
Ex. $1,000 Bankroll (80/20/10)
-$100 Daily: $80 Cash and $20 Tournaments
Ex. $1,000 Bankroll (85/15/5)
-$50 Daily: $42 Cash and $8 Tournaments
So this will give us roughly 80-90% of our day’s bankroll to play in cash games. You will need this number when we get to the next lesson on game selection.
Advanced Theory: I would highly suggest the use of a bankroll tracker to monitor and analyze your play. RotoGrinders has a free Bankroll Tracker that you can link to your FanDuel or DraftKings account. The other option is Rototracker, which is free up to 250 entries analyzed and then you have to get a monthly subscription if you have over 250 entries. Both do basically the same thing, which is give you a breakdown of not just money won and money lost, but they breakdown by sport, cash vs GPP, entry size, buy-in level, and ROI%. Rototracker takes it a step further with even deeper possibilities like day of the week, opponents, and even different slates.
So you have to be asking – why I do I need all of this data? I just want to play! It all goes back to the reason you purchased this course. You want to become a profitable MLBDFS player. Correct?
What all of this data allows you to do is to analyze your own play and find out specifically where your strengths are. Being a profitable player is all about finding an edge and exploiting that edge. If you know exactly what type of games, slates, and buy-in levels you are most successful at, you are going to have a huge edge over the rest of the field. Obviously, this takes hard work and time to analyze this data, but you have to be willing to do what it takes to win.
Lesson One Recap
1. Bankroll Management is key to long term success in DFS.
2. Follow the 80/20/10 rule or develop your own to suit your game.
3. Stick to the plan!
4. Religiously track and analyze your results.
Bankroll management in Pot Limit Omaha is one of the most overlooked aspects of the game. Because PLO is a fast paced “action game” it often attracts gamblers and adrenalin junkies who are more interested in the possibility of getting lucky and making lots of money fast than protecting themselves against the possibility of a bad run of cards from the poker gods.
Because you’ve sought out this website I already know that you’re not like that. You don’t want to rely on luck to beat the games, you want to rely on skill. When you’re winning because you’re the best player at the table you can keep making money indefinitely and even turn poker into a full term career, but if you’re winning because you’re getting lucky it’s only a matter of time before it all comes crumbling down and your bankroll is obliterated overnight.
So how should I manage my bankroll?
That’s a good question! In No Limit Hold Em it is generally recommended that you should maintain a bankroll at least 20x the buyin for the stakes you choose to play. That means that if you play at the $10 six max cash game tables then you should start with a $200 bankroll. Of course if you don’t have thatmuch to begin with you can’t always follow these guidelines, but they are best practices if you want to avoid going broke should a bad run of cards fall your way.
Because PLO is a much “higher variance” game, however, we recommend you try to keep at least 40 buyins in your bankroll for whatever game you’re choosing to play. That means if you’re currently playing the $50 PLO cash games then you should stick to those stakes until you have built your bankroll up to $4000, at which point it would be a suitable time to move up to the PLO $100 game. By sticking to these guidelines you will almost eliminate the possibility of going broke and your skill will shine through in the long run. Remember though, if you were to go through an unlucky streak and your bankroll went down below $2000 you would want to switch to PLO $25. By always moving down as your bankroll shrinks it will be almost impossible to go broke.
On the other hand the absolute worst thing you can do, and the sign of a gambler and not a poker player, is to move upwhen you start losing rather than moving down. It’s a typical human reaction, to try to chase your losses by moving to bigger stakes. The problem with this strategy is that if it doesn’t work, and at least half the time it won’t, you’ll end up going broke extremely quickly and losing everything you might have worked months to build up.
The lesson is this: if you want to make sure you have a future in poker and a possible reliable income then you need take bankroll management seriously.
Dfs Cash Game Bankroll Management
But what is variance?
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Variance would be any event that departs from your expectation. In poker you usually get your money in with varying degrees of equity but you will generally either win or lose by the river. Let’s say you get all in on the flop with top set against your opponents open-ended straight draw. You are roughly an 80% favourite and the pot is $100. Your “expectation” is $80 over the long run, but in this particular hand you will always either win $100 or end up with $0.
Getting into that situation repeatedly would earn you a lot of money over time, but if you were unlucky you might even lose 3 times in a row. That would be what we call variance and it happens more often and more brutally than some people realise.
In Pot Limit Omaha you can be the best player at the table and because of a bad run of variance you might still lose 5, 10 or even 15 buyins. The more situations where you get your money in close to 50/50 the higher the variance will be. In Pot Limit Omaha coinflips are extremely common–far more so than in NLHE–and because of that you want to have a larger bankroll to deal with the swings the game inevitably delivers.
The other reason the variance in PLO is so high is because it’s so much easier to get outdrawn on the turn or the river. In No Limit Hold ‘Em if you flop top set you’ll almost always have the winning hand by the river, in PLO on the other hand you have to get used to being constantly outdrawn. Using some of the tips and strategies outlined in this website will help you to learn when to get away from big hands when you’re beat but you’ll still be forced to often pay off in situations where it feels like you’re getting unlucky over and over again.
Poker Tournament Bankroll Management
To give you an example of just how erratic variance can be over the short run take a look at the following two images. The first image shows 100 players who normally have win rates of 5 big blinds for every 100 hands they play. In poker circles this is generally the notation used to determine somebody’s “win rate” and 5bb/100 is considered vary high. The image shows the random variance of 100 players over 100,000 hands playing at the $25 buyin 0.25/0.50 cent games. You can see that some players who are riding the good side of variance earn a massive $5000 whereas the unluckiest players barely eke out a small profit.
Then compare that to the 2nd image which is over a 1 million hand sample. Here we can see the randomness of variance beginning to equalise and everybody showing clear profits, as good players always will do over the long run.
[Click either image to enlarge]
How can I begin to build my poker bankroll?
The trouble with needing $2000 just to safely play the $50 PLO cash games is that most people do not have $2000 to invest. Perhaps you are just learning the game and only have starting capital of say $50-$200. Don’t worry, that’s fine, and it’s how I started.
I built my entire bankroll from one single initial deposit of just $50. From there I played very low stakes until I built it up to $200, I then moved up a little more and it all snowballed from there. Don’t get me wrong, along the way I went down as well as up, but whenever that happened I made sure to drop down and never risk more than 10% of my roll on any one table at any one time. It was this discipline, rather than any good play on my part, that allowed me the time to improve my game, learn from my mistakes, and all the while not go bust.
The problem with this process is it was a long and gruelling one. It took me almost six months before I was able to start playing at stakes that actually meant realistic money. When I finally began playing the $100 tables and earning a few hundred dollars a week that is when I was finally able to quit my job and make Poker my full time living. Sure it wasn’t much at the time, but the freedom and the knowledge that I was on the path to real earnings was exhilarating.
But who wants to grind out tiny profits for six months?
Live Poker Cash Game Bankroll Management
Although I did it, it was because it was the only way I knew. Later I realised that there was a fast track way to building a $2000 poker bankroll and it’s all to do with making the most of the sign up bonuses the various online cardrooms offer. By simply moving your bankroll around from site to site while taking advantage of their great deals you can turn a $50 deposit into a healthy $2000 bankroll within just 2-3 months EVEN IF YOU’RE A BREAKEVEN PLAYER!
Bankroll Management Calculator
The even better news is that because you’re using the strategies on this website there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be a winning player while you grind out these bonuses which means at the end of the process you could have an even bigger bankroll that that.
Fidelity Checking And Savings Account
Because I firmly believe that this is the number one fastest and most under-utilised tool in the poker player’s arsenal I have written a step by step guide showing you exactly how to do what I’m talking about. You can check it out here: