Three Hundred is a Long Time

by Lou Krieger | Published: Dec 17, 2004

I usually make a concerted effort to write about one subject at a time in order to make it easy for you, the reader, to follow. But this time, there's a potpourri of material, a grab bag, if you please – linked however tenuously by the number 300 – coming your way.

Did I Really Do This? This marks my 300th column for Card Player, and if you're amazed by that, I'm really astounded. My first Card Player column appeared in 1992. Back then, the World Series of Poker's main event was a lot smaller, and 1992 marked the second year that as many as 200 players entered the main event. Million-dollar paydays were still just a glimmer in a marketing man's eye, and no one, but no one, ever thought about 3,000 participants. A $5 million payout for first place wouldn't even register on a 1992 fantasy scale, and if you suggested that poker would be the perfect made-for-TV reality program, you'd have been hauled off for a drug test.

1992 was before the Shulmans had the magazine and even prior to Linda Johnson's stint as publisher. June Field, who founded the magazine, was still the publisher when I sat back one day and decided I wanted to write for Card Player. It took about two weeks of writing, rewriting, and editing, but I managed to produce seven sample columns that I sent off to June with a note telling her I'd like to become a Card Player columnist. I also asked whether she would have some time to get together the next time I was in Las Vegas. When she said yes, I phoned her, told her I had plans to be in Las Vegas the next week, and set up a meeting with her and Maryann Guberman, who was doing editorial and production work at the magazine back then. I was overjoyed when they told me they liked my stuff and wanted to use it, but reality hit me like a sharp slap in the face on the drive back home. Would I ever be able to think of anything else to say about poker? I asked that question of myself over and over again as I headed south on I-15. The last thing I wanted to do was bite off more than I could chew, and if I really had nothing more to say about poker, I'd have made a major fool of myself.

I suppose I got lucky, because now, after 12 years of writing a column every two weeks, the words flow easily. But occasionally I still get those feelings about running dry. Whenever that happens, I force myself to sit down in front of the keyboard and start typing. After all, with 300 columns already written, I know I'll be able to turn out a column anytime I need to, just on dogged persistence alone.

Once Every 300 Years: I'm presuming 2005 will bring 3,000 or 4,000 players to the World Series of Poker's main event. That number is staggering just on the surface, but when you begin to dig into it, it becomes even more amazing. It's particularly interesting when you think about handicapping the event and begin to analyze what kind of chance any single player has of beating a field that large.

Let's take a good player. No, let's take a great player. Make him the greatest hold'em player who ever lived. Suppose his chances are 10 times greater than those of Joe Average, even though the chasm between great and average is probably not anywhere near that deep. With that kind of edge, our hero figures to win a 3,000-player event once every 300 times. If he has a 60-year poker-playing career, he ought to win the World Series of Poker once every five lifetimes. An average player, by comparison, figures to win all the marbles only once in 50 lifetimes.

No one can ever really be "favored" to win an event with 3,000 entrants – but someone will. Someone wins the lottery every week, and those odds are a lot longer than 3,000-to-1. Someone will play extremely well, have inordinately good luck, and go on to win this event. Since good luck includes the absence of bad luck and precludes ridiculously bad beats, getting through a 3,000-player field probably requires placing a premium on surviving the first few days of the event, rather than aggressively going after chips early on. After all, if you find yourself going all in too many times, you figure to be outdrawn some of the time, and too many drawouts can put a severe crimp in your once-in-five-lifetimes chance of winning.

When you think about it this way, you can laugh at players who tell you they are going to win the event this year because of the great poker they're playing, or because they feel extremely lucky. Neither statement stands up to the numbers, and unless these overconfident poker players figure to live 300 years or longer, they can't even claim to be a favorite within their own lifetime. This sort of thing makes Dan Harrington's win in 1995 coupled with his recent spate of final-table finishes all the more amazing, and is probably a testimony to his incredible skill as well as the validity of "Action Dan's" playing style and his ability to continue to survive and to avoid putting all of his chips at risk until he gets close enough to sniff the money.

Three Hundred Big Bets: Conventional wisdom holds that a winning cash-game player needs approximately 300 big bets to sustain the predictable ups and downs that are part and parcel of playing poker. But just accepting a number like this without digging beneath the surface can lead you down some slippery slopes. First, a 300 big-bet bankroll presupposes that one is a winning player who can beat a game for approximately one big bet per hour. If you're not a winning player, you'll need a much bigger bankroll – one large enough to outlast your poker-playing life expectancy. But even if you win regularly, albeit at a rate less than one big bet per hour, you can figure on needing a substantially larger bankroll to sustain you through poker's peaks and valleys. If you're fortunate enough to play in a game you can beat for two big bets per hour, you ought to be able to get by on a shorter bankroll.

Even the game itself has some effect on the bankroll you need. If it's a very volatile game, or if your own style is characterized by taking lots of risks in order to maximize every small edge you have, you will need a bigger bankroll than someone else whose less edgy style produces a reduced variance.

Many players tend to be underfunded. If you're playing $10-$20, a 300 big-bet bankroll requires you to have a $6,000 playing stake. If your game is $20-$40, you'll need $12,000, and $24,000 if you make the jump to $40-$80. You'll need even more if you're also paying your bills and daily expenses out of your poker bankroll.

The major implication of these bankroll requirements is that you have to do some serious winning – and serious saving – in your current game if you want to jump up to a game in which the stakes double. If you want to hedge your bets a bit, maybe you can jump from $10-$20 to $20-$40 once you've built up a 250 big-bet bankroll of $10,000. But if you do that, you ought to be prepared to jump back down to the lower game anytime your bankroll hits 200 big bets, or $8,000.

Regardless of how you slice things, 300 can be a long time coming when you play poker, regardless of whether you're writing about the game, figuring on winning the WSOP, or merely building a bankroll to promote yourself to the next level.