The Poker Player’s Manifesto

Managing your money starts with the first hand of poker you play and ends when you have so much money that you don’t know what to do with it all. Since we’ve all seen athletes make tons of money and end up broke in their 40s, this is pretty much never for a poker player.

Everybody falls into one of two categories, amateur or professional. Bankroll management for the amateur player is simple: never risk more than you can afford to lose…without getting angry. If you’re losing and having a miserable time, then the money matters too much to you. Move down in stakes until you can take the natural swings and variance of poker in stride.

I have been amazed over the years at how salty and miserable people often are in small-stakes games, while I have never seen anybody get truly bent out of shape playing high stakes. It took me a few years to realize that the guys playing $4-$8 with one rack of $1 chips in front of them often don’t have any money in the bank, and if they do, the $100 is pretty important to them. Taking a bad beat means a pretty big percentage swing in how much money that person has. People naturally get upset when they’re broke and just got broker thanks to the river card. This isn’t something unique to fish or bad people, it’s universal across the game. People get upset when the money matters to them. The guy that takes a bad beat in stride usually has the most money at the table.

Those guys who have so much money from crushing life in some other facet that they can afford to play high stakes for fun are my idols in the poker world. They’re smart and excellent at something, and they like the challenge of playing a big game. They can dust off five digits and not care, because five digits out of a pool with seven in it doesn’t mean anything. That’s like losing $10 when you have $1,000. The lesson here is that if you’re getting upset about beats, then you’re playing too big. It’s a game, chill out, everybody takes and gives bad beats. Move on to the next hand, there’s nothing you can do about that river card now.

The second category of player is the professional. This added pressure of needing to pay for rent and groceries with money won at the poker table makes beats and bad runs hurt much more. As a professional, attitude is everything, and as discussed in part I of this series, a professional with a bad attitude won’t be professional very long. If bad beats did not exist, then professional poker players would not exist. Amateurs might take on Rory McIlroy once for the experience, but they certainly won’t keep coming back to gamble against him because they have no chance of winning. Any one of you can beat me or any other professional poker player in a heads-up match though!

Bad beats and variance are the essential parts of poker that makes it a game attractive to everybody, since anybody can win today. We as professionals know that if we get them on a slow boat to China though, that eventually we’ll get all their money, so why worry about it in the meantime? Let them enjoy their victory, because that taste will keep them coming back for more.

You cannot be a professional poker player without a proper bankroll, and most people grossly underestimate bankroll requirements. I ran a variance simulation a few years back that simulated a thousand equally talented poker players playing an identical game for the same number of hands, enough to fill up an entire year. Their expectation was $100,000 each that year, but the courses their paths took were extreme. One lucky person won $400,000, while the unluckiest lost more than $50,000 that year. Over a hundred of those players experienced swings that eclipse most bankrolls. The rest of them formed a bell curve with the majority being up around the $100,000 mark at the end of the year.

Your bankroll needs to be bigger than you think it should be. A bunch of those players who ended up making $100,000 would have never have gotten there in real life because they went broke before the end of the year on one of those soul crushing downswings that plagues poker players. It’s important to note that all thousand of these players are equal, and that the guy who lost $50,000 is just as good as the guy who won $400,000. Chew on that for a second and project it onto real life scenarios and perceptions.

If you play limit games, I want you to have at least 500 big bets in your bankroll to play that game. If you want to play $30-$60, then you had better have $30,000 behind you. If you don’t, then move down and beat a smaller game until you do. For no-limit games I want to see you with at least 30 buy-ins, 50 if you play deep. Therefore if you play $2-$5 and usually buy in for $1,000, you had better have at least $25,000 behind you to play with minimum stress and maximum ability to withstand a downswing.

Bankroll is like a tournament stack. Chips you have are worth more than chips you win, and chips you lose are worth more than both of them. As your bankroll dwindles, so does your earning opportunity, because you have to move down in stakes as your bankroll diminishes. If you regularly crush $10-$20 limit hold’em, take a shot at $40-$80, lose a bunch, and then end up with a bankroll that shouldn’t be playing $10-$20, well then you made a major mistake.

The best way to grow a bankroll is to play within it and pay yourself hourly out of your bankroll. When I was getting started, I was playing $15-$30, had about $10,000, and was beating the game for $50 an hour. I paid myself $20 an hour and lived off that money, which certainly helped with swings and such, and the rest of the money went to my bankroll. Six months later I rolled into Vegas with $20,000, having lived a comfortable life in the meantime.

If the money is important to you, then move down in stakes. ♠

Bryan Devonshire has been a professional poker player for nearly a decade and has more than $2 million in tournament earnings. Follow him on Twitter @devopoker.