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Bankroll Management
It is very important that you manage your bankroll well. You have to make sure that you don't play over your head by playing on stakes that your bankroll cannot support. If you do this then you will not have the money available in your bankroll to recover from slumps.
There are two golden rules of bankroll management you should adhere to:
- Never sit down at a stake level with less than 75 - 100 times the Big Blind - this gives you a reasonable chance to recover from short term slumps and periods of times where you do not receive good enough cards to play.
- Never commit more than 5% - 10% of your total bankroll at one table.
What percentage you are comfortable with depends on your circumstances. If you have other money to reload with and your bankroll isn't really that big of a risk to your overall financial position then you can take more of a risk and use the 10% figure. We recommend you use the 5% figure as this gives a reasonable protection that you won't go broke.
As an example if you are considering sitting at a $0.50 / $1 No Limit Hold'em game then you should sit down with a minimum of $75 to $100 and have a total bankroll of around $1,500 as the money you are sitting down with ($75) represents 5% of your bankroll. Depending on how protected you want to be, if you are using the 10% figure then you would need about $750 in your bankroll.
Why is this important? Well no matter how well you play and how well you stick to your new strategy, poker is a game of odds. Even if you play with the odds in your favour (which you will with this strategy) then there is still that chance that you will lose and some of the time you will lose hands, some of them maybe big pots and you may suffer a bad beat and lose your entire stack.
To protect against this you only commit a certain percentage of your total bankroll to the table at any one time and then if you do have a bad period and lose, then you have the backup of another 10 or 20 buyins (75 - 100 times the Big Blind) to make that loss back up.
As your bankroll moves around you have to adjust the stake levels you play on, so if you have a losing period and your bankroll drops then you should drop down to the lower stake level until you have built your bankroll back up again.
Throughout this course as you build your $25 into $1,000 you will follow a high risk bankroll management strategy. You will have up to 30% at times of your bankroll in play which is much higher than we recommend above.
The reason for this is that we are trying to build your bankroll up quickly so that you have a good base to start your long term bankroll with. Your initial investment in this challenge is only $25 and we are prepared to take a high risk with that to get some quick results.
After you finish the course and have build up a decent starting bankroll of $1,000 then we highly recommend that you use either the 5% or 10% rule. If you do this then you reduce your chances of going broke and your bankroll will enjoy a steady growth over time.
Remember - Stick to these two bankroll management rules otherwise you will very quickly go broke, and never play with money you cannot afford to lose!
1.8 End of Module
Right, now we have introduced you to this course, you have downloaded and opened an account on fish filled Ladbrokes Poker and we are now ready to start learning our strategy so lets move onto Module 2.
CONTINUE TO MODULE 2 -
