How big of a bankroll do you need to play limit X?

The answer is often “300X” or something along those lines. Gary Carson makes some good points on the topic, saying that perhaps it shouldn’t be so simplified. I agree. What I find is not asked often enough is what you need your bankroll for. I mean, very few people who ask how big of a bankroll they need are actually intending to play with it for a living.

So what is it good for?

The only reason to keep a bankroll (well, the only reason that I can think of right now, to be fair) is to set a limit for yourself as to how much you’re willing to risk playing poker, one way or another. A recreational player sets the risk by assigning his bankroll to be the largest sum of money he is willing to lose. A professional who has no other source of income wants a very big bankroll in comparison to the limits he plays to avoid the risk of ruin. They use their bankroll in different ways (very different ways) but in both cases it’s about risk management.

Professionals can do their own math how big of a bankroll they want. For recreational players, and I’m one of those myself, I have a different perspective to offer. What if instead of looking at arbitrary numbers such as “300 BB” or some other reasonably large number, you try to figure out yourself what the largest limit you can afford to play with your specific bankroll without risking ruin? That’s what it’s really about, isn’t it?

So let’s stipulate some stuff. First of all, let’s start by realizing that completely avoiding risk of ruin is not reasonable. Secondly, let’s stipulate that there are good games to be had all the way down to $.05/$.10 online. Third, if you ever get so low as to actually having to move all the way down to the lowest limit and you get busted even there, then perhaps it’s time to save up some money and buy a book.

Alright, if we can agree on these three statements, let’s look at a real case. Or rather, let’s look at a generic case.

You have X dollars. X dollars is enough to play at limit L. How big is L in comparison to X? Well, X and L have a linear relationship: they’re proportional. If your bankroll is slashed in half, you can only afford to play a limit half as big as L. That doesn’t help us directly, but it’s an important step on the way. If we can also stipulate that the minimum you will ever sit down at a table with is one normal buy-in (online, that translates to 100 BB for NL and 20 BB for limit) and that we should always be willing to risk whatever we sit down with at the table, we see that X has to be at least two buy-ins. At least. Because if we lose our buy-in, we can move down to one-half of L, and make another buy-in. And we can keep this up all the way down to $.05/$.10.

But having just enough for a single buy-in probably isn’t enough. We will have some bad beats along the way, and we might want to not immediately get up from a really juicy table right when we start finding the useful reads just because our stack is too short to be effective. Let’s say that we’d like to be able to rebuy twice. After that, we set a stop-loss and get up and leave. Does that seem reasonable?

In that case, we now know how big of a game we can play with $X. We can play at a game with buy-ins of X/6, and that will keep us reasonably clear of ruin. We can have a $1200 bankroll and play $200 NL. If we lose three buy-ins consequitively, we move down to $100 NL. Etc. If the highest limit you can play this way is $1/$2, you will have 5 levels worth of buy-ins to get through before you’re busto, meaning that you’ll have 12 buy-ins + 3 (you will step down to $10 NL with six buy-ins there but will not be able to move down further) = 18 buy-ins. That’s pretty close to the 20 buy-in limit that people recommend otherwise, and you’ll be playing easier games as you move down. It’s just that easy.

… If we’re robots.

We’re not robots, fortunately, so this probably won’t work very well for us. We’ll end up constantly playing with a very large portion of our bankroll meaning that every loss will feel devastating. Also, I have a bit of a hard time swallowing my pride and moving down in limits, and I don’t think I’m alone in the world with that problem.

I bothered writing this up because I think that so many just use these “20 buy-ins” or “300BB” recommendations as a god-given truth, when it’s more of a very rough estimate of what seems to work for most people. If you’re disciplined enough, you can surely take shots at higher limits with a lot less than 20 buy-ins, or 300 BB. Food for thought.