This article is not designed to help you gain an edge on the felt; on the contrary, this article is designed to help shape your outlook on the bigger picture of poker away from the felt, which is one of the biggest leaks most players have. All the aspects of a professional’s career away from the felt added together are so much more important than a professional’s abilities while at the tables. <READMORE>

I know that almost all of you have read numerous articles in the past about how many buy-ins one should have in order to insure the safety of your total roll when playing, but in these articles there is a lot of conflicting information. My purpose here is not to say who is right and who is wrong; my purpose is to show you why one’s perspective, circumstances, and overall skill level is what should be the determining factor in how much of one’s roll that individual should invest in any one tournament buy-in. The examples that I will pull from my previously mentioned conflicting information come from articles by Daniel Negreanu, David Sklansky, and Chris (Fox) Wallace.

Daniel Negreanu has claimed before that no one should ever invest more than 5% of their total bankroll on any one tournament (20 buy-ins). In years past, David Sklansky has claimed that a winning poker player will need 55 buy-ins to withstand the variance of multi- table tournament poker to all but insure that he will never go broke. In Fox’s bankroll management article, he claims that a good standard for a professional that uses poker earnings to live off of as his main source of income is to have 200 buy-ins to be able to withstand the variance of multi-table tournaments.

So who is right and who is wrong? None of them are right or wrong because what an individual player needs to withstand variance is going to be determined based on the player’s individual abilities on the felt, as well as their current life circumstances. It’s very easy for Daniel Negreanu in his current life circumstance to say that no one should ever invest more than 5% of his total bankroll on any one tournament, because he’s also said before that your bankroll is only as big as the amount of money you can borrow. This theory tends to hold true for most of the other poker professionals that have made a name for themselves in the poker world and would have thousands of investors lining up at their door if they ever showed the slightest bit of interest.

Having said that, Daniel Negreanu is also a helluva lot better poker player than I am. It doesn’t take a math guru to figure out that if his ROI is 100% and yours is 50%, you’re going to need at least twice as many buy-ins for your total bankroll to be able to withstand variance at the same level that you’re both playing. In Sklansky’s time, the 55 buy-in rule was based in the pre-internet and pre-poker boom eras where the field sizes on average were far smaller. It’s not uncommon for today's highly aggressive tournament professional to go 30-40+ tourneys in a row without a cash. If they were following Negreanu or Sklansky’s bankroll management strategies, they’d be in a world of hurt.

Wouldn’t it would be nice to be able to calculate one’s true ROI? Then knowing exactly how many buy-ins one would need would be a simple equation that could be calculated for every individual at every level. It just sucks that those same math gurus tell me that you have to play approximately 20,000 MTT’s with over 100 players to give a player a true depiction of what their ROI actually is.

This is where a player’s individual priorities come into play. Is your priority to play it safe and make sure you never go broke, or is your priority to get paid? If you don’t have a problem always being broke and just grinding it out, then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. If your priority is to live a comfortable, stress-free life where the results of one individual tournament will never bother you but you still are able to generate a large steady income in the long run, then more power to you as well.

When my son was born two years ago, I was playing $100 MTT’s on 30 buy-ins to pay rent and tuition while taking 19 credit hours of school, as well as going through the Army Officer Training Corps at Ball State. That period of my life was the hardest and most stressful time on my marriage, social life, sanity, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Shortly thereafter, I almost went broke, and it took a miracle to keep my head above water.

Ever since I managed to build my roll back up to 200 buy-ins with a sick amount of patience and discipline, I have strictly played MTT's where I have 200+ buy-ins in my total online bankroll. I don't break this rule, regardless of what the tournament is or the occasion, because it’s just not worth it to me to play over my head. I know that all of you know “That Guy” that constantly plays out of his roll, constantly is broke, constantly is begging for money, and will cash in a $5 MTT for $1000 and then immediately lose it all back the next day on $100 heads up turbo sit and goes. If that lifestyle is what you’re looking for then live like there’s no tomorrow. If that’s not the kind of life that you enjoy, then I would consider slowly and patiently building up your roll and moving up levels as your roll dictates.

Having said all this, there’s always that fine line in bankroll management when deciding what is and is not worth your time. Say you follow the bankroll management guidelines that I just gave you and you want to be a professional poker player from scratch. You deposit $400 onto a site, and now you’re playing $2 MTT’s, 12 a day, 5 days a week, to ensure that you don’t go past your 200 buy in threshold. If your ROI is 50% (which if you’re a new player it probably won’t be that high), you will be making about $12 a day, which comes out to about $1.50 an hour.

At this point, you really need to acquire a taste for $.50 Swanson frozen chicken pot pies at Wal-Mart, or you need to find a new job because $1.50 an hour just isn’t going to cut it. This is why so many micro players have such a hard time building up a roll; they’re not playing at a level that is ultimately worth their time. Using proper BR management, at least they never go broke though. If you’re only making $1.50 an hour on average, maybe the best thing for you would be to go broke so that it forces you to get a better paying job.

Time is more or less infinite to the individual player; what is not infinite is money. If your roll is only $400 like the micro player, at the very least you know that the more and more hours that you play, the more and more your roll will grow, and then you can continue to move up levels. If you are making $1.50 an hour today, in three months from now if you continued to move up playing on 200 buy-ins, you’d be making $2.75 an hour. If you want to learn discipline the easy way, join the Army; if you want to learn discipline the hard way, build up a $50k+ roll on 200 buy-ins, starting at $2 MTT’s and never cheating your BR management plan. Anyone that can do that is a sicko, IMO.

If you plan on making a 100% legitimate career out of poker, you have to look 100% long-term. If you think that you can make a successful career out of poker, you have to realize right now that you’re going to have to make more money at it in 40 years than you would’ve if you had worked in the civilian sector for those same 40 years. If you honestly don’t think that you can profit $2.5-5 million over the next 40 years, then you’re doing nothing but wasting your time and should be somewhere applying for jobs or furthering your education.

But on the other hand... If a disciplined, above-average winning player plays 12 MTT’s a night for an average of $100 buy in with a modest ROI of 33%, he would profit approximately $4 million over the next 40 years, even if he never moved up a single level once in his career. I see article after article and post after post on this site about hand histories and playing certain hands properly or incorrectly, and all this knowledge does for a player over the long run is shift his ROI positively or negatively. Don’t get me wrong, it is very important for profitability to have a higher ROI. At the same time, however, if your ROI is only 20%, it is more than possible to make a decent living at this game if you have all of the aspects off of the felt in check, but if your ROI is 80% and you have no outside management and perspective skills or goals, you will have a very hard time making poker your career.

Every aspiring professional should set realistic and achievable goals and implement a solid plan to achieve it in the allotted time. I personally have a goal of making $1 million profit strictly online by my 30th birthday. Is this an achievable goal? Yes. Is this a lofty and unlikely goal? Absolutely, but even if I am only able to achieve 50% of my goal, I will still have made more money than approximately 80% of my graduating class from Ball State in the same time frame, which many would still consider to be a great success.

All of the previously mentioned skills away from the felt should be the basis and foundation of any professional’s career. You can analyze hand histories until you think you play absolutely perfectly, but if you don’t acquire the discipline to implement these principles, you’re setting yourself up for a much more difficult and emotional grind than the professional poker life already is.

This is really the first worthwhile piece of anything that I’ve contributed to the P5’s community, and if this article seems to be a redundancy, I apologize in advance. All types of feedback are more than welcome. Good luck; I hope to see you all at the tables.

-Aaron
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