The Tankroll-BRM is an aggressive bankroll management system that's geared towards players returning from a break from poker or players who want to leave behind the micro stakes quickly. You should only consider using the Tank-BRM when the following points apply to you: You're not a beginner anymore. – Tournament Format Adjustments – Finances – Other Topics & Conclusion – Hand History Reviews – Resources; Bankroll Management. To access this content, you must purchase Poker Coaching Premium Membership. To access this content, you must purchase Poker Coaching Premium Membership.

Poker Bankroll Calculator – Shows What Tournament Buy-In Levels Are Right For Your Bankroll

Experienced poker players use bankroll management to smooth out the natural swings in the game. This cool widget will give you a head-start on the opposition by showing you what buy-in levels are safe for your starting bankroll.

Poker Tournament Bankroll Management Factors - #1 - Pro or Recreational Player? The consensus for online poker professionals who play MTTs is that you need a bankroll of 100 buy-ins for the level at which you play. To the player new to Multi Table Tournaments this can seem high. Looking at the nature of variance in the game can show why this is. Bankroll management in online games like poker is a key component of game planning and strategy that every player needs to focus on to stay in it for the long haul. Your online poker bankroll is the backbone for all games you are going to play which is why you need to keep it rock solid by calculating your spends and making smart decisions when choosing your games. Bankroll Management and the right choice of tournament. If you want to play online poker tournaments, you will find you have a huge selection to choose from. New tournament offers are dished out by poker websites practically every minute. But these are not all the same kind of tournaments.

Underneath the widget you will find an explanation of key poker bankroll management principals. And some great advice for making sure you give yourself the best possible chance of building a big balance and breaking through to the next level.

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Bankroll Management Calculator

Finding games with the softest opponents will make you way more money. Check out Party Poker - the original poker site and still the best for incredibly easy games. You’ll get £40 / €30 tokens on your first deposit with bonus code SNGPLANET + cashback paid direct to your player account every Monday. Check out www.partypoker.com now!

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How To Use This Poker Bankroll Calculator:

This widget will show you which buy-in levels to aim for in Sit N Goes and Tournaments. Simply put your starting bankroll and choose your player type, and you’ll see the numbers appearing.

For multi-table tournaments, this is your average buy-in level, which can include shots at higher buy-ins as long as they are balanced with smaller buy-in games. Your ideal Sit N Go bankroll will depend on whether you are multi-tabling 5+ games.

You’ll find some background and some practical uses of poker bankroll management below – first of all, here is an awesome deal to make sure you get that bankroll off to a flying start!

Poker Bankroll Management – Overview And Practical Uses

The reason we need to manage our poker bankrolls is variance – the chance flip of the cards which can make a huge difference to whether you win or lose, no matter how well you play.

Variance has undoubtedly made entire poker careers. There must be 1000’s of pros who ‘ran well’ when they first started and then built their skills later. Conversely, there will be millions of players who gave up poker after starting with a little bad luck – many of them are probably more than capable of beating the game.

The longer you play the more you see how downswings and upswings feature in the game.

There is only one solution for players wanting to ride out the storms and keep their poker profits steady, and that is bankroll management.

Bankroll Management Guidelines Seem Very Strict

When you are new to poker, the bankroll management guidelines seem crazy – 1% of your bankroll for tournaments? Only 5% in any one cash game? How will you ever make money with those rules.

Well, the truth is that these numbers have come from the collective experience of millions of players over decades. It gets proven over and over again, that if you risk more of your bankroll than the general guidelines, your risk of going broke even when you are playing well shoots up.

Here are the general guidelines:

Cash Games: Play with 5% of your bankroll on any one table, this is 20 buy-ins for your current game.

Sit N Goes: Play with 50 buy-ins for your current level.

Tournaments: Play with 100 buy-ins for your average game.

Pot-Limit Omaha Cash Games: Play with 30 buy-ins for your current level.

Bankroll Management Poker Tournaments Real Money

Poker Bankroll Management – Using These Guidelines To Take Shots

I recommend that you take shots at the next buy-in levels up. This can seem contradictory on a page which is showing you strict bankroll management rules – however it is not.

The alternative is to keep building your bankroll until you have 20 / 50 or 100 buy-ins for the next level up. This can be slow, and there is no guarantee you will be able to beat the next level when you do get there.

I suggest that you build up 4 or 5 buy-ins for the next level instead.

You can then take a shot with that money. Maybe also cutting down on the number of tables you play so that you can watch the games more closely. If you win then great – you will have the bankroll to move up fast. If not then you can sit back in the games which you know you can beat, and rebuild.

The advantage of using bankroll management to take shots is that it only takes a good run at the next level to see you move up very quickly. You could be crushing the mid-stakes while your friends are still grinding it out at the micros!

Poker Bankroll Management – These Factors Influence Your Final Choice Of Bankroll Level

Several factors influence whether you stick strictly to bankroll management guidelines – or whether you can be a little more flexible on this.

Can You Easily Reload?

If you are a recreational player who can easily reload your account with more funs if it all goes wrong, then you should relax with these guidelines a little. I’d go for 50% of the recommended levels at least as insurance against mild downswings though.

Are You A Maniac At The Tables?

Your playing style will make a big difference. At the extremes, tight and conservative players will not have the big wins too often, though will not see such swings in their bankroll either. If you are loose and aggressive then your win-rates should be higher, though your swings will be bigger – meaning you need to be stricter with bankroll management.

Are You An Online Poker Pro?

If you aspire to make poker your sole source of income, then you’ll need to take bankroll management seriously. The added pressure of needing to make regular cash-outs will benefit from a little more protection from variance.

Bankroll Management And Active Table Selection

Finally, you really need to be focused on finding the softest games if you are really going to make poker pay. Active table selection can add 20% to your hourly profits very easily (something that is hard to do with play alone!), and seeking the fishiest sites – especially those linked to sports books – can make an even bigger difference. Check out the Fish-o-Meter widget up-to-date advice on the softest sites around.

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Using The Kelly Criteria For Poker Bankroll Management – Applies The Kelly Approach To Tournaments

We've covered a variety of topics in this series on multi-table tournament strategy (MTTs), starting with a discussion of tournament structures, the importance of stack sizes, and chip accumulation vs. survival strategies, then moving through the early, middle, and late stages of MTTs and onward to the final table.

To conclude the series, let's talk a little about bankroll management and tournaments, an area that sometimes trips up even experienced poker players who aren't as mindful as they should be of how the variance of MTTs should affect what buy-in levels they choose.

Tournament bankroll management: Why have a bankroll?

It goes without saying — a 'poker bankroll' refers to money set aside for poker only, and should not overlap with living expenses or other funds designated for other uses.

Most poker players who are successful over the long term practice strict bankroll management in order (1) to ensure they can play their best at all times (and not be 'scared money' playing above their heads and worried about losing), and (2) to help lessen their 'risk of ruin' by avoiding getting involved in games that can threaten to deplete their entire bankroll and force them to quit altogether.

If you're only a casual poker tournament player, perhaps jumping in MTTs once in a while for fun as a way to break up the monotony of cash games, you needn't worry too specifically about tournament-specific bankroll management. But you shouldn't ignore it, either.

The only real bankroll concern the casual MTTer should have is not to play a tournament for which the buy-in is so high it will disturb your ability to play without worry of losing what you've paid. If you typically play a $1/$2 no-limit hold'em cash game where you might win or lose as much as a few hundred in a night, playing a $5,000 NLHE tournament is probably a bad idea, both because of the higher level of competition you're likely to encounter and the possibility that your fears of not cashing and losing that big buy-in will negatively affect your play.

Some pros suggest cash game players should never risk more than around 1/20th of their cash game bankroll when playing a tournament. In other words, if you have $5,000 set aside as your cash game bankroll, you really should limit yourself to playing tournaments with buy-ins of $250 and below. If you wish to play a higher buy-in tournament, you can consider selling action in order to lessen your risk.

You can adjust that 1/20th figure up or down depending on your own risk tolerance, but be cautious about risking too much on a single 'shot' at a high buy-in MTT. Only 10-15% of those playing tournaments tend to cash, and even if you're an above-average player in the field your chance of not cashing is going to be greater than your chance of making the money at all, let alone enjoying a big score.

For players who are more serious about playing tournaments — especially if you've chosen to specialize in MTTs to the exclusion of cash — you need to think specifically about your tournament bankroll and always be mindful of how a given tournament fits or doesn't fit into the requirements you've provided for yourself.

Tournament bankroll management: How is it different from cash games?

Cash game players set bankroll requirements based both on the stakes of the games they wish to play and game types.

Obviously higher-stakes cash games require a larger bankroll than do lower-stakes ones, but perhaps not so obviously certain game types require deeper bankrolls than others because of the increased variance or 'swings' they cause.

If you wish to play short-handed (6-max.) or heads-up cash games, you need a deeper bankroll than you would if you stick with full-ring games. Similarly, playing a game like pot-limit Omaha is going to require having a larger bankroll than playing NLHE at the same stakes, since PLO typically tends to cause wider swings.

Similar principles apply to bankroll management for multi-table tournaments. That said, those familiar with managing a cash game bankroll may miscalculate what it takes to maintain a sufficient MTT bankroll.

Someone who regularly plays $1/$2 NLHE cash game for which the typical buy-in is $200 might reasonably think a bankroll consisting of 30 buy-ins or $6,000 is plenty (although more conservative players may opt for an even deeper bankroll).

However for a multi-table tournament player who plays $200 MTTs, a bankroll of $6,000 is not going to be adequate. Given the variance of MTTs, even good players can occasionally go 30 tournaments without a cash, a possibility that is much more likely to occur than for a good cash game player to blow through that many buy-ins.

Tournament bankroll management: How many buy-ins do you need?

A typical recommendation for tournament players is to have at least 100 buy-ins in your bankroll for any tournament you play, although it should be said right off that is often a minimum recommendation. Even so, you can see that for a player of $200 MTTs, that means having a $20,000 bankroll at minimum to absorb the swings of MTTs — much higher than the bankroll of a cash game player whose buy-ins are the same $200.

The same advice goes to the online poker player who sticks with $5 multi-table tournaments, for which a $500 bankroll would represent a comfortable minimum. You can take shots at those $10 or $20 tournaments once in a while, but know that in order to move up to those buy-in levels permanently, you'll need a bigger roll.

Meanwhile, there are several other factors that can push that 100 buy-in suggestion even higher.

For one, if you're on the cautious side you may want to have at least 200 buy-ins or even as much as 500 buy-ins in your tournament bankroll. Also, if you mainly play large-field MTTs, you'll also likely want to have more buy-ins given the higher variance of those events when compared to smaller field tournaments.

How you approach tournaments — that is, your playing style — also matters when it comes to MTT bankroll management. While we've been recommending 'going for the win' in this series, many tournament players place a greater emphasis on simply cashing than focusing on trying to make final tables where they can play for real money. Such players tend not to win the big prizes up top, but may overall experience less variance and thus can get away with having smaller bankrolls. This is where many recreational MTTers end up, with bankrolls of 60 buy-ins (or even less) and cashing enough to stay in the game.

The more serious professional tournament players who do play for the win are going to need deeper bankrolls in order to handle those long stretches between final tables when they aren't cashing at all.

Tournament bankroll management: How does your ROI affect bankroll decisions?

Finally, if you keep good records (as you should) you can calculate your win rate in tournaments — commonly referred to as your return on investment or 'ROI' — and use that figure as another guide helping you decide how deep of a MTT bankroll you should have.

Your tournament ROI is calculated by dividing how much you profit in tournaments (your 'return') by the amount you spend on buy-ins (your 'investment'). Usually the result is then multiplied by 100 and shown as a percentage:

• (winnings - buy-ins) / buy-ins *100 = ROI%

While it's somewhat subjective to say what a 'good' ROI is for MTTs, obviously anything above zero percent marks you as a winning player. Having a 10-15 percent ROI is good, and anything from 25-30 percent ROI and above is going to be better than many MTTers. Meanwhile only the top pros tend to reach and sustain levels higher than those.

Having a relatively small ROI means needing a deeper bankroll so as to ensure you're able to stay in the game during those dry stretches, while having a consistently high ROI means you can get away with less.

One important word of caution, though — don't be overly affected by small sample sizes when looking at your tournament ROI. One big tournament win can inordinately skew a player's ROI, sometimes inspiring false confidence about the sustainability of such a rate.

Don't let a ROI percentage calculated from just 10 or 20 multi-table tournaments inspire wild adjustments to your MTT bankroll management strategy. In fact, some say you need at least 1,000 results for the sample size to be significant enough to be meaningful, so while you should keep track of your results, understand what they mean when you do.

Also in this series...

Ready to take a seat at the table? Put these multi-table tournament tips into practice at PokerStars.

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