"Hi my name is Fox and I'm a bankroll wuss"

Crowd - "Hi Fox"

It all started because I quit my job too early in my poker career and have often had to play on a short bankroll because my living expenses prevent my bankroll from growing. That and the $50 bottles of wine and the $100 bar tabs. <readmore>

For my first year as a pro I don't think my bankroll was ever over $5,000, but I kept grinding away and making enough to live on and keep my bankroll sufficient to play. As my skill increased my win rate increased, but I'm very cautious with my bankroll and I don't take many chances. If I lose my bankroll I have to get a job, and I have absolutely no interest in getting a job. When my choices are to either play safe limits where a prolonged losing streak can't break me, or to get up in the morning and go to work the choice seems easy.

Being a wimp about my bankroll has it's advantages of course, like never having to borrow money or find a stakehorse, but it has held me back for too long. My ultimate goal is to play more multi-table tournaments and hopefully make most of my income through them, but that requires a larger bankroll than most people realize. I've only played 5 MTT's in the past month, and I have final tabled 3 of them, which makes me want to play them that much more, but here are some scary statistics from Mark Blade's Professional Poker Volume 1 -

If you know that you are a solid tournament player and have averaged a ROI of 2 (which means you have made twice your money back on tournament buy-ins over the long run) you need 55 buy-ins to give yourself a 95% chance of surviving without going broke. You also have a 5% chance of not breaking even until 175 tournaments. Those numbers also assume the tournaments are only 200 people. With larger field sizes these days online the numbers would be even more scary.

My ROI over the last 500 tournaments (I played a lot of tourneys last year) is actually 3.8, so even if that isn't sustainable I know that I'm doing better than an ROI of 2 like he used in the example. Even with an excellent win rate with the larger field sizes and that looming threat of a job if I fail I simply can't force myself to make the jump into playing MTT's constantly. I thought about looking for someone to stake me but I'm not good at asking people for money and at this point I am making a comfortable living playing limit ring games so I can't see myself going begging for a stake any time soon.

My bankroll is growing and I'm hoping to reach a level where I am comfortable playing a lot more tournaments soon. When I get to that point everybody better watch out because I'm bound and determined to take a run at the rankings here on P5's. I can't see myself at the top of the rankings because I dimply don't have it in me to play 20 or more tournaments a day, but I see no reason why I couldn't crack the top twenty with a few months of consistently playing tournaments for a living if my ROI stay as high as it has been.

In other news the response from the PathWays articles has been awesome. A number of people have been surprised that I mention RPT and cardrunners in the articles, but that is missing the point. My writing is not a commercial for my website, it is meant to actually help people on the path to becoming a solid winning player. If I didn't mention those two great resources I would be omitting something that can really help people.

I haven't seen cardrunners videos yet, but I have seen their instructors play and they are damn fine players so I can only assume their advice is excellent. Todd gave me a free membership to realpokertraining quite a while ago and I have made good use of that watching every new video that comes out, and not mentioning them as a great learning tool would be shortchanging the reader terribly.

In the end these people aren't even my competitors really. The price points and teaching styles are very different, and anyone who can afford either site can easily afford mine with a little extra pocket change. The free money programs we run will easily pay for a yearly membership within a week or two anyway.

Keep an eye out for the Omaha Pathways article inthe next week or so and the tournament article with input from Beanie and the RPT guys soon after that.

See you at the final table,
Fox
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